
Class .__£. lo\)4 

Book JJlAj)ZlZ 



•,t>' 



CHAUNCEY M: DEPEW 



Birthday Addresses 



AT THE 



MoNTAUK Club of Brooklyn 



i8ci2 to 1899 



The Montauk Club is a well-known social organization in New York which has 
attained great prominence and reputation under the Presidency of our distinguished 
fellow-citizen, Mr. Charles A. Moore. 






5 ti 8 36 
»03 



Address of Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

the Birthday Dinner given to him by the 

Montauk Club of Brooklyn, April 23, 1892. 



Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: 

I should be the most insensible of men if I did not 
deeply appreciate the great compliment which you 
pay me. While the occasion makes my heart beat 
happily and arouses an honest pride, it presents no 
subject for a speech. This is not a gathering of 
political friends, martyrizing themselves to become 
a medium by which the orator can get his views 
before the country. It is not a collection of reform- 
ers, ambitious to have the speaker sit down because 
each one in the audience thinks he could improve the 
subject much better than the man on his feet. It 
is not a convention to promote principles, float poli- 
cies or fresco men. Gentlemen of all political par- 
ties, of all religious creeds, of all professions and 
business pursuits are gathered in this room. That 
they meet to greet me is a distinguished honor; that 
the occasion is my birthday and decorates that natal 
hour with choicer flowers than ever have enshrined 
it before, this celebration, called for no public pur- 
pose or patriotic event or public man, is a tribute to 
the resources of friendshif) and the expansive prop- 
erties of club life. 

The twenty-third day of April is, of course, one of 
the most important in the calendar. On it St. George 
was born; also Shakespere and myself. St. George 



6 

belted the globe with his drum-beat and his flap:; he 
became our prooenitur. On account of his failure to 
appreciate the proper relations, national-wise, be- 
tween parents and children, we found it necessary 
first to thrash him and tlien to declare our inde- 
pendence. That we have since become the principal 
object of his admiration, is due to our exertions and 
not to his teachin<i,'. But we ahvays extend to him a 
cordial welcome, are hospitably entertained v.iu'n 
we go to the old lionie, and are ready to render him 
any proper assistance if he slutuld need it and it i^i 
right for us to give it. 

Shakespere died at fifty, and I am to-day fifty- 
eight, with the consciousness of firmer hejiltli, fuller 
powers, and keener enjoyment of life than ever be- 
fore. I believe that Shakespere died because he re- 
tired from business. He had demonstrated, for the 
glory of the human intellect, that " myriad minds ■' 
could be housed in one brain, and then retired to 
Stratford to live at ease. I have observed that 
health and longevity ai'e indissolubly connected with 
work. Work furnishes the ozone for the lungs, the 
appetite and the digestion which support vigorous 
life, the occupation which keeps the brain active 
and expansive. V.'hen a man from fifty upward re- 
tires, as he says, for rest, his intellectual powei's 
become turbid, his circulation sluggish., his stoi'iach 
a burden, and the collin liis home. lUsuKU'ck at 
seventy-five ruling (Jermany, Thiers at eighty, 
Fi'ance, Gortschakofl" at eighty-one, Kussia, (Jlad- 
stoiie at eighty-two a j»ower in (^reat Britain, Simon 
Cameron ai iiinely taking liis lirst outing ahr«»ad and 
enjoxinu' all llie I'atiuiies as well as the deliuhts of 



a London season, illustrate the recuperative powers 
of work. Those men never ceased to exercise to the 
extent of their abilities their faculties in their chosen 
lines. I have seen Gladstone moving along the street 
with the briskness of a man of twenty-tive. I have 
heard him at the dinner table discourse for hours 
upon ever}' living question, as if he would live long 
enough to solve each one of them. I have sat with 
him in a box at the opera when the movement upon 
the stage absorbed him as completely as it did the 
musical ciitic in the orchestra chair; but his judg- 
ment was moved by the fresh enthusiasm of youth, 
lu the Old World the club is the home of the 
bachelor and the Avidower, and the house of refuge 
for the married man who is the victim of home rule. 
AVhile the American club has, as it ought, the vir- 
tues and the attributes of that of the effete civiliza- 
tion of Europe, it has other virtues which are Ameri- 
can. This gathering illustrates them. It is the gre- 
garious feature of the American club which is its 
principal benefit. Its members leave at the door 
their politics, their creeds, their professions, their 
shops. In a pure democracy, with free discussion 
" under the rose,'' the best quality of each becomes 
the common property of all. The tone, the character, 
the influence of the best men meet under the best 
conditions and convey moral lessons v.hich supple- 
ment those of the Church and temperance lecture, 
which have more restraining influence than the 
pledge. The Democrat discovers that the Repub- 
lican is not wholly bigoted, and the Eepublican finds 
out that the Democrat is not wholly bad; the Epis- 
copalian discovers liberality in the Presbyterian, 



and the Presbyterian rubs against something besides 
form in the Episfopalian, while the Baptist discovers 
that a man can be spiritually clean ^yithout being 
immersed. Youth is glorious, and yet when a man 
of fifty and past looks back upon his mistakes, upon 
the perils from which Providence and not his own 
good sense have rescued him — perils which would 
not have existed if he had had during the whole 
period the mature judgment of to-dav — he would 
not go back and live his life over again. Secure in 
the accumulated possession of friends, of family, of 
realized opportunity, he would not jump once more 
into the stream and strike out for another shore. 
The glory of youth is its ideals. V^'e love to read of 
Burke's letter to his constituents telling them that 
his conscience was above their votes, and recognize 
our ideal statesman. We study the ideals of our 
Wirts and our Storys and our Websters, and idealize 
the lawyer; of the Jonathan Edwardses, and other 
giants of the pulpit, and idealize the minister; of 
Kobert Morris, the patriotic banker of the Eevolu- 
tion, and idealize the business man. 

We have found as we have rubbed against them in 
life that the statesman is often more of a schemer 
than a patriot; that the great soldier is egotistical, 
garrulous and narrow-minded on all questions but 
armies; that the lawyer sometimes substitutes tricks 
for settled principles of law and that the minister 
talks to the galleries rather than to the souls of the 
congregation; while the business man makes a phe- 
nomenal success u])on standards VN-hich would i'e- 
verse the Decalogue. A calm review, however, and 
a jii<li<ial and im]»artial examination of tlie many 



9 

examples afforded throiigli an active aud busy life, 
demonstrate that after all the masses are better than 
their representatives. The common sentiment of 
business is honest, of the pulpit is pure and lofty, of V 
the congregation is moral and aspiring, of the law is 
just and noble, and politics has principles and hon- 
est men. Thus believing, because we know, we pre- 
serve our ideals. The woman who married us in her 
young girlhood is still as fresh and beautiful as on 
the day when she wore the orange blossoms. We 
fight for our party and we fight for our religi.)n 
because we believe they are right; and the one is best 
for this world and the other sure for the next. 

And now, gentlemen, I take it that the lesson of 
the hour is this: A multi-millionaire, who had a phe- 
nomenal faculty for accumulating money, but en- 
joyed neither books nor music nor social gatherings, 
once said to me: " What is the use of all my money 
to me? My house is larger, both in the city and 
country, my yacht is finer, my horses are faster, my 
pictures are better and more numerous than those of 
any of my neighbors, but they get as much enjoy- 
ment out of theirs as I do out of mine. I cannot eat 
as I would like to Avithout getting dyspepsia, nor 
drink as I want to without addling my brain, and 
I find that, except in getting more of that of which 
[ have already more than I know what to do with, 
I get little out of life." That man is a fool who does 
not wish to accumulate money for independence and 
for the benefit of his children; but he is a bigger fool 
to sacrifice everything for that. The college pro- 
fessor, intent upon his work aud satisfied with his 
lot, the country doctor, the literary man, the jour- 



10 

nalist, the member of the professions who has time 
for his clubs and his friends, and his politics and his 
church, never ask the question, '' What do I get out 
of life? " Life to them is one perpetual enjoyment, 
in expanding o])p()rtunities, in enjoyable pursuits 
and in steadfast friends. 

Well, gentlemen, I have preached my sermon; I 
have given you my philosophy of life; I have touche^l 
hands with you and my hear-t has beat to-night in 
unison with yours. After all, the best things in this 
world are its friendships and its opportunities. 



Address of Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

tlie Birthday Dinner given to him by the 

MontaukClub of Brooklyn, April 23, 1893. 



The accident of this speech contributed to muni- 
cipal history. After its delivery the Mayor of Brook- 
lyn indi<inantly left the room. This led to a discus- 
sion from the pulpit and in the press, " Why did the 
Mayor leave the table? If the charges in the speech 
were false, he should have defended the city and 
refuted them." 

The public were aroused, committees of investiga- 
tion formed and a reform movement inaugurated 
wliich carried the city for a reform Mayor by an 
unprecedented majority. The city government was 
taken entirely out the hands of the officers who had 
so long abused their power. 

Mr. Presh'lent and GoitJeDien : 

I vras fearful until an hour which made my coming 
to you very late this evening that I would not have 
the pleasure of joining my friends here. As you 
know my Avife has been sick, and I have been declin- 
ing all invitations for weeks. But though so ill, 
Avhen she learned of this birthday dinner you in- 
tended giving me, she said : " I shall be exceedingly 
unhappy unless you go, and show by your presence 
how deeply we both appreciate the compliment."' 80 
I am here, profoundly grateful for the cordiality of 
your greeting. 



12 

Brooklyn is always iiiiitnie. It is tlio most origiuul 
miiincii)ality in the United States. Tlioiigli a city of 
a million of inhabitants, commere(^ and competition 
have not impaired the freshness and simplicity of its 
beginnings. In other places they celebrate birthdays 
when the citizen whose niemor}' is honored has been 
dead so long that his errors, faults and mistakes are 
forgotten, and only his virtues remembered. But in 
the midst of the controversies of the hour and when 
my deficiencies are painfully visible, the Montauk 
Club chooses to extend to me an annual welcome iu 
the most gratifying form of a festal celebration of 
my birthday. Such an event could only occur in 
Bro(dilyn. This great and generous municipality 
has in another and conspicuous instance reversed the 
rules governing mortuary recognition. For more 
than half a century and during all the period of the 
wonderful development of this city, one man has 
been always at the front, leading in eveiw work 
which would promote the welfare of his fellow-citi- 
zens. Parks and hospitals, asylums and pleasure 
resorts, schools, libraries and art galleries, have had 
their initiative in his creative mind, and their suc- 
cess by his energy, public spirit and executive ability. 
Brooklyn in erecting a statue to liim in liis life-time 
has fitly recognized its debt, and given to coming 
generations a perpetual example of civic virtue iu 
this monument to the worth while living, and the 
memory, when dead, of James S. T. Stranaluni. We 
trust our venerable fiicnd, 1(»v(m1 and h(in(»ii'd by us 
all, may round out his century. 

Brooklyn, hai>j)ily, dilTers from other cities in that 
she retains the touch of neiuliborhdnd, which is the 



13 

value of villa.fi,e life, and well deserves its title of 
the City of Churches. The vigor and virility of 
Puritan origin, and the unquenchable thirst for 
knowledge about every one's life and affairs, have 
preserved through all immigrations the character- 
istics of the Yankee settlement. Brooklyn is the 
third largest city in this country, and the fourth, or 
fifth, in the world. It has all the elements of cos- 
mopolitan and metropolitan life. Its public-school 
system is most advanced. It is the home of rare 
culture, high intelligence and aggressive reform. It 
has broad avenues, splendid parks, magnificent pal- 
aces and stately churches. At the same time, Brook- 
lyn is rural and provincial. The odor of new-mown 
hay pervades all its streets and the clover-blossom is 
the perennial badge of its citizens. It has that per- 
sonal contact of families and neighbors, so rapidly 
disappearing, and so invaluable in dissipating class 
prejudices and giving opportunity to the helping 
hand. 

This very confidence and credulity have led to con- 
ditions which are exciting the amazement of the 
outside world. There is no more acute question than 
the problem of municipal government. It is inter- 
esting the best thought and talent for afiairs in 
every country. The drift of rural populations to 
common centers, and the concentration of multitudes 
who have no acquaintance or common interests in 
cities Avhere, as they increase in numbers, they in- 
tensify isolation, add fierceness to competition, and 
increase the difficulties of earning a living, have 
alarmed statesmen and sociologists. While the 
thought of the world is absorbed in efforts to solve 



14 

these problems and miuimize mob dangers, by ihe 
equal distribution of benefits, rights and justice, 
Brooklyn is exhibiting startling originality in its 
contribution. It has surprised the people of the 
United States and paralyzed the statesmen of Eu- 
rope. One of the idiosyncrasies of this municipality 
is that a portion of the public moneys, which are 
raised by taxing everybody, are absorbed by its pub- 
lic officials as their personal perquisites without pro- 
test or comment. This has become a habit so fre- 
quently condoned that the press does not comment 
upon it, or the people get enraged about it, or the 
reformer become unpopular by referring to it, except 
as a visitor and in a dress suit. Reforms are not 
accomplished in dress suits, but rather in fighting 
rig. This taking of money out of the city treasury is 
no longer called defalcation, or theft, or robbery, but 
misappropriation, or diversion to cluunuds not au- 
thorized by law. Recently this misapproiu'iatiou 
became so bold and bald that the criminal authori- 
ties had to move the machinery <if justice. At the 
session of the Legislature just closed, the members 
from this city persuaded the Legislature to ado])t 
this remarkable doctrine: That as this money was 
openly taken, and there was no attempt at conceal- 
ment by the thieves, the ordinary j)rinciplt's in cases 
of robbeiy did not a]i]>ly. Tlic unfortunate officials 
were ignorantly following established precedents, 
and therefore their thefts should be legalized, and 
their jicrsecutors of the District Attorney's otVuc c\\- 
joined, and that relief measure became a lavr. Rut 
Brooklyn's contribution to the municii>al (luestion 
during the past year has not been limited to the 



15 

exoneratiou of officials who liave appropriated its 
moneys. It has advanced to the distribution of fran- 
chises upon philanthropic principles. Other cities 
sell franchises, and the rev(Mines derived from the 
sale of these privileges help the taxpayers and re- 
lieve the people of the burdens of government. But 
Brooklyn scorns such sordid motives, and gives away 
her franchises. Greece and Rome decorated their 
distinguished citizens, but only those whose statc^s- 
manship or generalship, whose genius in art or lit- 
erature, had won tlie gratitude of the people. They 
crowned them with wreaths of laurel or bay. But 
Brooklyn decorates favored citizens before they are 
distinguished for anything, by giving them fran- 
chises. Certainly the action of the city government 
in refusing an offer of half a million of dollars for 
the charter for a street railway, and in the same hour 
giving it without money or pledges to unknown in- 
corporators, as has been done this week, surpasses 
the fabled generosity of Monte Cristo, with his 
fabulous wealth. I could not let this annual com- 
pliment, coming from gentlemen who represent so 
much in this community, pass without a serious 
word upon some question of the hour. I have only 
the highest respect and best feelings for the Mayor, 
who honors us with his presence. I have unbounded 
faith in the ca])acity of the people for self-govern- 
ment so conspicuously shown in our national and 
state and township affairs being equal to the new 
conditions of great cities. It is neglect by the citizc^n 
of the first duty of the citizen which has called the 
attention of the country so unpleasantly to your 
home atfairs and compelled me to utilize this occa- 



IG 

sion to hold up to the light these recent events. Self- 
government in cities is on trial, and Brooklyn should, 
as Brooklyn can, be in the front of well-governed 
cities. The men here to-iiight can rescue Brooklyn 
from the outlaws who are iu possession of her gov- 
ernment, restore her fair fame and make her an 
example of high purposes in official life and success 
in good government. 

A birthday speech is like the remains of Dennis 
McCann. When he was blown up by an explosion 
of dynamite a committee was appointed to break the 
news to his wife. After the spokesman had informed 
her of the tragedy as gently as he could, she asked 
if Dennis had been badly mangled. "Well, yes," said 
the spokesman, "his head was found in one lot, and 
his legs in another and his arms in a tree half a mile 
off." "That," said the bereaved widow, "is just like 
Dennis. He was always all over the place." 

This is a gathering of successful men, of men who 
have made their own careers in the professions, in 
the arts and in business. It is a glorious sensation 
when one feels sure of his ])res(Mit and master of his 
future. With his fears and anxieties behind him, 
the trials and struggles, the privations and hard- 
ships of his earlier efforts seem to him to have been 
the exercises which have trained and disciplined 
him, and he feels like tlie successful athlete, proud 
of the steps by which he has mounted, and coiitident 
of himself. If he is a university man he recalls his 
loi'dsliip of the woT-ld \Nlieii, as an undergraduate, 
his crew won the I'at-e, Iiis team carried off the 
honors of the li(dd and he took tlie ])rize in the 
debate, and he lias a fuller, broadt'i- and healthier 



appreciation of being a man. The boy born to for- 
tune cannot enjoy these exquisite pleasures which 
come to those whose falls and bruises have left the 
honorable scars which eloquently testify to their 
persistence and skill in climbing the ladder of fame 
or fortune, or both. Most successful Americans 
reach this position of masterj^ of themselves and of 
their vocations early enough to have before them 
years of enjoyment. Few of them embrace the op- 
portunity. They develop lust for power, and with it 
the cruelty of power. They become selfish, hard and 
grasping. They lose sympathy and touch with their 
fellows, and cultivate contempt for the less com- 
petent, the unfortunate and those who are moder- 
ately endowed. The real pleasures of life are denied 
such men, as they are to beasts of prey whose sole 
gratification is to kill and gorge. 

But the wiser man says: " With the leisure which 
comes to independence and the trained ability for 
great affairs, I will now know my library; I will 
take up and pursue the studies which were the de- 
light and ambition of my youth; I will become inter- 
ested in public affairs and take part in polities and 
work for good government; I will garner old friends 
and make new ones and feel the sweet recompense of 
doing something for others.-' In a few years we 
hardly recognize this man. He has grown broad and 
liberal. Without neglecting his business, he is felt 
everywhere. The church and the club, the parish 
and the hospital, the literary circle and the working- 
man's organization are receiving the help of his in- 
fluence and the inspiration of the resistless optimism 
of his buoyant health and success. He is experienc- 



18 

ing a happiness and fullness in living which is pro- 
longing and enriching his life. It has been said that 
during the middle ages the people were marking 
time, but making no progress. But this man is ener- 
gized and impelled by the movement of the century, 
and learns to enjoy the exhilaration of high speed. 

The pleasures of life largely depend upon the rela- 
tions existing between our subordinates, assistants 
and employees, and ourselves. Observation and long 
experience have taught me that we get better service 
from love than from fear. There is nothing in my 
career as a railroad president for which I have been 
so much criticised as in showing my faith in this 
theory by putting it in practice. An old-time 
executive officer said to me early in my career 
as a railroad president, " You have every requi- 
site for success, except the knowledge of how 
to treat men. You are too considerate, too 
familiar and too easy. Make them feel the 
impassable gulf between the executive and the 
subordinate officer or employee. Sentiment and 
pity have no place in business. Be just, but severe. 
Bemember that you are dealing only with the tools 
of the machine for whose working you are respon- 
sible. Distance inspires both awe and respect. Rule 
by fear; favors will be taken advantage of and re- 
garded by the recipients as weakness." I differ i)i 
toto from this method either for efficiency of service 
or comfoi-t of administration. When every man 
knows tliat if he does right the president is his 
friend; when he understands that the policy of the 
open door is for him and his grievances, and if he 
has any they will be instantly heard; when out of 



19 

the office and off duty he feels the camaraderie of 
candid recognition and hearty good-fellowshii) from 
his chief, he will protect in every way the interests 
and the reputation of the president. No detectives 
need Avatch him, for the company's business is his 
business and he is attending to it with his whole 
mind and strength. Loyalty and devotion to and 
affection for the president dominate every branch of 
the service, and results are obtained which are im- 
possible by the harsher methods. The officer who is 
thus surrounded experiences freedom from care, con- 
sciousness of success, and that indefinable and ex- 
quisite pleasure which comes from the incense of 
visible and invisible, external and internal applause. 
Though I have been the manager for years of one of 
the greatest corporations, with the largest number 
of employees of any company in the world, I have 
never had a labor trouble, and it has been due to the 
practice of these principles. -That to-night I have the 
healtJi, vigor and hilarious enjoyment of a boy and 
look forward hopefully to serene old age is the result 
of the same philosophy of life and its associations. 

I suppose there were periods when bigotry and 
venomous partisanship had their uses. They were 
the bleeding and the calomel of the old practice. But 
in our times there is infinite pleasure in the habit of 
tolerance. I have little faitii in the man who has no 
creed but is friendly to all. There is a healthy at- 
tachment to our church and our pai-ty, because we 
believe them the best. It is delightful also to think 
that our neighbor's path to Heaven, though more 
difficult, still leads to the pearly gates, and his party 
is admirable for critical and deterrent purposes in 



20 

the opposition, thougli dangerous in power. Give 
to onr friends tlie credit for as pure motives and un- 
selfish purposes as those which actuate ourselves, 
and our social atmosphere has the charm of health- 
ful differences, and in temperate discussion we all 
get nearer the truth. 

To be glad of the recurrence of birthdays is to 
rejoice that we have lived and humbly petition to 
live longer. To have our friends join in that celebra- 
tion, as you do to-night, touches with the tenderest 
emotion that pardonable self-consciousness which 
expands and asserts itself, because others so cor- 
dially shout hail and keep on. 



Address of Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

tlie Birthday Dinner given to him hj the 

MontaukClub of Brooklyn, xA^pril 21, 1894. 



3Ir. I^ reside Jit aiu/ Gentlemen : 

I deeply appreciate the compliment of these an- 
nual birthday celebrations which you tender me. 
After the feeling of gratification come the burden 
and responsibility of that inevitable incident of 
every American gathering — the speech. With no 
question before the house it is difficult to do it once, 
but when, before substantially the same audience, 
it comes the second, third or fourth time, the 
situation is critical to a degree. If the guest and 
orator indulges in rare pleasantries, pleasing plati- 
tudes and that ingenious collocation of words which 
says nothing and means nothing, he insults the in- 
telligence of his hearers. If, on the other hand, in 
an audience like the present, composed of men of all 
political faiths, all religious creeds, and all sorts of 
complicated associations and interests, he says some- 
thing, a section of his audience are sure to say that 
they are insulted. The speaker, under such condi- 
tions, is always in the position of the small boy 
whose enterprise pulls from the closet the family 
musket and points it at the head of his sister. Y\'hen 
the coroner's jury sits upon the case, his explanation 
is that he did not know it was loaded. Whether the 
meeting shall continue harmoniously or break up in 
a row depends upon whether the owner of the in- 



22 

diilged foot which got in the way of the trampling 
speaker groans and confesses his pleasure, or howls 
and acknowledges the corn. 

At the celebration last year the proper question 
seemed to me to be municipal reform. It appeared 
equally proper to indulge in caustic comments and 
peppery pleasantry upon matters affecting your city 
which had received the attention of the Goyernor 
of the State, the Legislature, the Grand Jury of your 
county and your courts. Had it dropped into the 
ordinary sea of after-dinner give and take, the ques- 
tion would have been dissipated with the smoke of 
the last cigar. But somehow or other, while I w;is 
innocently cavorting around the field, everybody 
grasped his neighbor's arm convulsively, and seri- 
ously remarked, " Chauncey has said something ! " 
The next morning from the Aldermanic chamber of 
the Brooklyn City Hall, from the court-room of the 
police justice where the blind goddess loves to dwell, 
from departmental chiefs and city contractors came 
the screams that the gun was loaded and everybody 
was filled with shot. Incidentally, pulpit, press and 
public-spirited citizens proceeded to inquire Mliat 
was the matter, and the result was one of tliose revo- 
lutions ^\'hich occur but once in a quarter of a cen- 
tury in the history of a municipalty, and which re- 
stored the weakening confidence in popular govern- 
ment in great cities. 

There should be no politics in the administi'ation 
of a city. It is a pure matter of bu^iness. It is 
whether the streets upon which the people travel, 
the water which the people drink, the liglits which 
illuminate the people's way, the police who protect 



23 

the people's lives and property, the courts wliich ad- 
minister justice for the people, are conducted in the 
interests of the people, and give the best possible 
results for the least possible expenditure. The only 
wonder is that the stockholder does not in the 
municipality show the same earnest and attentive 
interest that he does in the railway or the bank or 
the insurance company in which he holds his stock. 

It may be permissible to say in the freedom of the 
hour that all the fruits that were gathered by the 
great reform tornado of last year are neither ripe 
nor sound. Some of them certainly seem to require 
an amount of that tonic which is known as popular 
indorsement and public opinion to keep them 
straight upon measures of the greatest concern to 
the people of the state and of the localities. 

I have been led to remark, and wondered at dis- 
covering, that it was accepted as fault-finding, that 
there are about Brooklyn many of the elements of 
a great village, many of the characteristics of a 
New England town. We, all of us, with our experi- 
ence in the government of great cities, if we would 
consider seriously the question, would rejoice to find 
that more of that personal responsibility on the part 
of the voter, that individual espionage into public 
affairs by the citizen, which characterize the suffrage 
of Xew England, were the characteristics of the 
great cities of the country'. 

I heard an incident in my recent travels of a 
caucus held in a v/estern city, where an enthusiastic 
orator presented in glowing phrase the merits for 
the nomination of that grand soldier. General Mulli- 
gan. The speaker on the other side said he knew 



24 

all about the patriotic services of General Mulli;^an, 
for be was a private in the same company and tbe 
sentinel who stood at the door of the General's tent 
when a Confederate officer called; that be bent bis 
ear to listen to the colloquy, and he heard tbe Con- 
federate officer sav: '' I want that sword of your?:," 
and then tbe General said, " It is yours.'' Tbe friend 
of the General, unabashed by this exposure, arose to 
say that General Mulligan was a perfect gentleman, 
and when tbe Confederate officer expi*essed a desire 
for his sword why should be not give it to him when 
he could buy a thousand like it in Chicago ? The 
result was that the General was nominated almost 
by acclamation. 

It strikes me that the only platform left in this 
country for absolutely free speech is tbe after-dinner 
platform. All others are hedged about with con- 
ditions which make it impossible for tbe orator to 
speak his whole mind. At political meetings tbe 
audience is generally composed of those of tbe same 
\l faith, and they expect that the other party will ])e 
proved to be utterly bad, and their own to be en- 
tirely good. Tbe lecture platform was at one time 
the place where a popular man with convictions 
could express those convictions with effect, and have 
them reach the remotest corners of tbe earth. It 
was then that Theodore Parker, AYilliam Lloyd 
Garrison, Wendell Phillips and I\al])li Waldo Emer- 
son, under the privileges of tbe lecture i)latfor!n, 
inculcated the most unpalatable truths of liberty. 
Wendell Pbillijts could bo bowled dov.ii in I'aiuMiil 
Hall, or niobbod in the liroadway Tabernacle, but 
on tlio lecture jtlatform, in describing tbe life and 



25 

deeds and the death of Toussaint L'Ouverture, he 
could drop the seeds of that truth -which bore fruit 
upon the plains of Kansas and flowered iu the 
emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. 

The pulpit iu the old New Eup,iand days had abso- 
lute freedom iu the discussion of every state, town 
or county question. The judgment of the minister 
Avas the verdict of the people. This continued in 
some remote Connecticut villages even into the Civil 
War. I remember being once with that capital 
campaigner, General Bruce, when the Town Com- 
mittee said to him, as he was about to address a 
Connecticut audience in a rural neighborhood: 
'' General, our minister is very much disturbed by 
Lincoln's acts outside the Constitution. He says 
that his Bible teaches him that the law is ordained 
of God, and, therefore, he cannot see why the Con- 
stitution can be violated even to free the slaves or 
liberate the country." General Bruce, with his 
fine personal appearance, and his clergyman-like 
utterance, rose to the occasion. He said : " I under- 
stand that that eminent and eloquent divine, who 
is the pastor of the leading church in this village, 
has doubts about the rightfulness of Tresident Lin- 
coln's acts because they are not sanctioned by the 
Constitution, although they are for the freedom of 
the slaves and the safety of the Bepublic. I reply 
to him that when Moses received the tablet which 
contained the Constitution of the children of Israel 
directly from the bauds of the Almighty, and went 
to the foot of the mountain and found the children 
of Israel worshipping the idols, he smashed that 
Constitution into ten thousand pieces, though it 



l^ 



\y 



20 

was constructed bv God, and uoi by man, and drew 
his sword and rested not in killing the rebels until 
the sun went down." The minister arose, came 
forward, grasped the General warmly by the hand, 
and said: "General, the exegesis of that chapter 
which you have given is not in any commentary in 
my library, but it strikes me as very sound.'' 

To-day, however, the pulpit is not a force in the 
discussion of public affairs. Not but that it is 
equipped with as much courage, and as much elo- 
quence, and as much learning as ever, but for some 
reason, which I have not now the time to discuss, 
the public does not now accept from the pulpit its 
views upon municipal, state or national affairs, so 
we have left only the after-dinner platform. 
That is yet free from the chains of conventionality, 
custom or routine. At the annual dinner of the 
Xew England Society both in this city and in New 
York; at the ann-'nl dinner of the Chamber of Com- 
merce, in Xew York, men of national reputation, be- 
hind whose words stand a name and a record which 
men respect, whose lips utter truths, let on the light 
in a wa}^ which would not be permitted anywhere 
else. So far is this permitted that among that most 
sensitive people, the Irish, that genial and caustic 
genius, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, indulged in utterances 
which were received with laughter and applause; 
uttered anywhere else, Mr. Choate would have been 
compelled to leave the platform. I trust that for 
the sake of good morals, good government, good 
laws, good candidates, for the sake of all that goes 
to right living and right thinking, and right voting, 
the after-dinner platform ma}- continue free. 



27 

It is a peculiarity of the American people that 
they attend to but one thing at a time, but they at- ]/ 

tend to that with great thoroughness, and they have 
an almighty anxiety to settle it before they take up 
anything else. For a period the whole thought of 
the country was concentrated upon the interpreta- 
' . tion of the Constitution which might mean the in- 
divisibility of the National Union or the sovereignty 
of the several states. When that was settled by the 
marvelous and unanswerable argument of Daniel 
Webster, in his reply to Hayne in the United States 
Senate, the next question was the spread or con- 
_^ tinned existence of human slavery. When that was 
settled, the next question, which called a million of 
men to arms, was the preservation of the Union free 
from slavery and upon the lines decided in the argu- 
ment of Daniel Webster. And when that was 
settled the American people took up the great ques- 
tion of the national credit, as affected by the sol- 
vency of the currency and the character of its 
industrial legislation. The exigent question of the 
hour appealing to every man, woman and child is 
prosperity and employment for the people. I do 
not speak of this in a controversial sense, but only 
as a condition which has produced an unusual de- 
gree of hopelessness and to ask you wiiether that 
hopelessness is justified and should end in despair. 
Had you traveled with me during the last vv'ei'k, 
when I covered all the territory from the Missouri 
to Xew York and from the Atlantic to the Canadian 
border, you would have felt your faith revived, if it 
had at all weakened, in the resurrecting power and 
the tremendous and resistless energies of the people 



L^ 



Y 



o 



J 



28 

of tlio Nation. Tbey stand by their mills waitin.ii 
to open them; they stand bv their shops waiting to 
work in them; they stand by their stores waiting for 
actiyity; they stand in the railway yards and by the 
railway depots Ayaiting for work. All they ask is 
that the question Ayhich suspends the actiyity of the 
business energies of the country shall be settled at 
once, one way or the other, "With a people like the 
people of the United States certainty is the assur- 
ance of success. There mux be greater success 
under one certainty than there is under another, 
but whatever the certainty the people will adjust 
themselves to it. On the other hand, doubt is 
death. 

A birthday anniversary reminds one both of the 
beginning and of the end of life. It suggests the 
inquiry, " Are you glad you started? Are you satis- 
fied with your career as far as you have gone? When 
and how will it end? " I never saw a man who had 
enough energy to crawl who was so tired and so 
disgusted with this Avorld that he was ready to 
climb the golden stairs. Granted a good constitu- 
tion and then a clear conscience and uncloud<Hl 
brain, a temperate life and plenty of work, and a 
man can live forever. He neither rusts nor rots. 

What kills people is worry — worry for that which 
they do not want and do not need. T have seen 
hundreds of men who had passed middle life and 
who were assured for the rest of their days com- 
petency and income, launcli into sjuM-ulat ion, lose 
their fortune and die of worry. I have seen thou- 
sands, for tlie sake of larger interests or great''r 
gains, go into business which requiivd the energy 



29 

and the vitality of youth and experience, and die of 
worry. I have seen them led by the importunities 
of friends to indorse notes beyond their ability to 
pay them, and die of worry. On the other hand, the 
best, the most useful, both in their energies and in 
their example, of the people I have known are the 
wise old men who believe that they have a mission 
and who work as long as they have breath, and who 
mean to breathe as long as they can. Commodore 
Vanderbilt was worth |20,000,000 at sixty, $30,000,- 
000 at seventy, and |100,000,000 at eighty-two years 
of age. That demonstrates that with his frugal liv- 
ing and adjustment to work and responsibility of his 
capacity, the meridian of his powers was reached 
after he had passed three-score years and ten. Glad- 
stone is a living example of the highest honors, the 
most majestic grasp of questions affecting a vast 
empire, coming to him after he had passed the period 
of three-score years and ten. 

The world grows better as it grows older, and 
people grow better as the world continues to roll on. 
May you and I, my friends, most of us having passed 
the middle period of life, find the evening illumin- 
ated with all the splendors of the dawn while we 
possess the vigor of the meridian. 



l/ 



Address of Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LL. D., 

at the Birthday Dinner given to him 

by The Montauk Club of Brooklyn, 

April 2oth, 1895. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen : 

On the 23d day of April Shakespeare, St. George 
and I were born, and I am the only survivor. It is 
hardly a case of the survival of the fittest. This 
annual compliment which you pay me is highly 
appreciated and valued. There is always some- 
where, however, either a fly or the remains of one 
in the purest amber. In my case it is the necessity 
on these recun-ing anniversaries of making a speech 
to substantially the same three or four hundred 
gentlemen who honor me, when the only subject be- 
fore the house is the person whose birthday is cele- 
brated. As he is forbidden by every rule to talk of 
himself, how shall he meet this annual obligation? 
He is in serious danger of having the guests cry out, 
as one of them did at a hotel where I was recently 
in the South, who, after the tenth day, as the even- 
ing banquet closed, remarked in a loud voice (I do 
not know that I get his chapter and verse correctly), 
" Hebrev^'s xiii, 2." The indignant landlady after 
a while said to him: " Sir, some of the best families 
which I have in my hotel are Jews, and they are hurt 
at this reference to them." He replied: '' Madam, 
I did not refer to them. It was simply a tribute to 



n/ 



32 

your daily dinner which I intended to convey by 
quoting a verse which reads, ' The same yesterday, 
to-day and forever.' " 

There is represented here every profession and 
business of our American life. The clergyman, the 
lawyer, the doctor, the man of affairs and the man 
of literature sit to-night within the hospitable walls 
of this most hospitable of clubs. The year since we 
last met has been so significant of events of moment 
to the well being of the State and society that they 
impress the lesson of progress and cheer the heart 
of the optimist by tlie evidences of continued im- 
provement in the world. It has been particularly a 
year of revolt, of independence and of the result^s of 
beneficent revolution. Our platform in the Montauk 
is as broad as the universe and as liberal as truth. 

After one serious break which broke the breakers, 
our discussions are free. It is understood that we 
are of all creeds and faiths in religion and politics. 
It is understood that we are here not as Republicans, 
nor as Democrats, nor as Prohibitionists, nor as 
Mugwumps, nor as Independents. We are here 
under the genial banner of good fellowship, to say 
what we please, so long as it is uttered " with 
charity toward all and with malice toward none." 
We start with the maxim that no party has a 
monopoly of virtue and no party a corner on vice. 
It is the party in power out of which virtue oozes 
and which gradually accumulates vice. Hence we 
have had tlie conditions which have led to the 
])h('noTiiriial overturning since last we were here. 
When Kings County changes 50,000 votes, when a 
Kepublicau Mayor of New York, by the changing of 



33 

70,000 votes one way to 40,000 the other, is elected, 
when for the first time in ten years a Republican 
Governor and a Kepublican Legislature get into 
power by 150,000 majority, it is not a party victory. 
It is because the good men of the majority, finding it 
impossible to purify municipal or state government 
within the organization, join the minority party to 
teach their rulers, organizers and leaders a drastic 
lesson. 

It is the plain teachings of such events that the 
lucky recipients of this combination of party fidelity 
and party disgust have it in their power to hold a 
sufficient number of the independent and thought- 
ful elements which came to them, to continue for a 
period the power in their own hands, or else they 
can so use their opportunities for personal, or selfish, 
or purely party purposes as not only to drive away 
the men who had joined them temporarily, but also 
a large hodj of their own independent following. 
In this way it is quite possible, if we may make such 
a metaphor, for a party to experience within a 
twelvemonth alterations from zenith to zero. 

The despair of the publicist and the sociologist 
has been the government of cities. The inrushing 
from the country and from abroad of desirable and 
undesirable peoples and the rapidity of settlement, 
making impossible the processes of assimilation, 
have made the municipal problem the despair of the 
statesman. But the last twelvemonth has solved 
that problem — solved it on the side of liberty, and 
American liberty. It has demonstrated that the 
vox populi is the vox dei, providing the voice of the 



34 

people can find some medium through which it can 
be heard. 

How shall the voice be registered in legislation? 
When a committee of a hundred or a committee of 
seventy of the best citizens that all parties may have, 
who have the confidence of their fellow-citizens, pre- 
sent a programme, and that programme is adopted 
by the public vote, it carries with it the instruction 
that the officers elected are the chosen representa- 
tives of the people, upon whom the people have put 
the responsibility, and in whom the people repose 
the confidence to frame the legislation which shall 
do away with the evils under which they have 
suffered and bring to them the reforms and good 
government for which they have fought and voted. 

Any declaration by statesmen, however wise, how- 
ever experienced, however conscientious, from dis- 
tant communities, that these committees and the 
officers elected on the wave of reform are novices iu 
politics, that they do not know what the people 
want, that they do not understand the needs of 
great populations, that their bills are foolish and 
their measures idiotic, is full of danger to the party 
organization, of which these gentlemen are the 
leaders, and its success in the future. It may be 
that the measures are idiotic; it may be that they 
are not wise; but the people whose representatives 
have framed them, as soon as they are defeated, will 
believe that they are the wisest measures ever de- 
vised by man, and the oftener they are defeated the 
more they will insist upon having them, or punish 
the party which dc^feated tlieni. 



35 

An event has occurred during the year, little 
noted, and yet of the greatest interest. I arrived 
in Chicago a few weeks ago to find candidates lost 
sight of in the popular discussion of a principle. 
The cabman who drove me around, the porter wiio 
carried my bag, the waiter who stood behind my 
chair in the hotel, the clerk who handed me the book 
in which to register my name, the ticket agent in the 
railway depot, the conductor on the car, the clerk 
in the big drygoods store and the elevator boy who 
carried us to the infinite heights of the Chicago 
building, all wanted to know what I thought of 
Civil Service Reform. The Legislature had passed 
a bill submitting to the people whether their offices 
should all be put upon Civil Service principles or 
should be the patronage of party leaders as thereto- 
fore. The result of this discussion in that most 
polyglot and cosmopolitan of Western cities was a 
majority of 50,000 for Civil Service. I remember 
when reformers with so-called fads, like the late 
George William Curtis, suggested Civil Service 
twenty years ago, how it was scouted by all parties. 
y\e all of us who were active in politics believed that 
parties could not be run except by patronage, and we 
all of us — and I as readily as the rest — declared 
that without patronage a party leader could not 
hold his place nor a party retain its power. It was 
for the patronage with which to control the party 
organization that Weed and Greeley split their 
party in two; it was for the same high purpose that 
Conkling, on the one side, and all the leaders against 
him on the other, kept us in an internecine war; it 
was for the same lofty object that the state machine 



\y 



36 

headed by Daniel Manninji:, and the city machine, 
headed by John Kelley, disrupted the Democratic 
party; and patronage, with its supposed power and 
influence, has those eminent knights, armed cap-a- 
pie, with lance at rest, at either end of the lists, 
waiting for the signal to charge, Grover Cleveland 
and David Bennett Hill. And yet the people of 
Chicago, defying the politicians, have taught them 
that government can get along without patronage. 
Civil service applied to cities solves the question of 
municipal machines and municipal bossism. To 
that must be added the separation of city elections 
from the state and general elections, so that a man 
can vote against a thief or an incompetent man in 
his own party for mayor or sheriff without destroy- 
ing the tariff or passing a bill for the free coinage of 
silver. 

The processes for political power are simple. A 
few masterful men, whose business is politics, and 
who believe that the end justifies the means, get 
control of the machinery of the dominant party in 
the municipalty. They elect their mayor ;>n<l their 
board of aldermen, which secures for them tlie public 
works, the docks, water, gas and electricity, and that 
gives them the patronage. Then they appoint the 
judges of the police courts and the civil justices, and 
tliat gives them infinite power over the liberty and 
property of the citizen. Then they elect their mem- 
bers of the legislature, and that prevents the govern- 
ing body from interfering with them. And then 
they intimidate the higher courts, so that no com- 
plaints will be entertained. This accomplished, the 
ureat cilv is absolutelv in the liaiids of a feudal 



baron, with his feudatories around him, intn^nched 
in the City Hall. The cit}' treasury supports from 
ten to twenty thousand retainers who are dependent 
absolutely upon the barony for their subsistence. 
Through them the baron holds the primaries, con- 
trols the organization, overawes inspectors, manages 
the count, owns the court and carries the legisla- 
ture in his pocket. Then we have this amazing con- 
dition, that the processes of liberty are capable of 
greater tyranny than the autocratic will of the 
despot. Despotism is tempered by the opportunities 
of assassinating the tyrant. Against a semi-republi- 
can and serai-oligarchical government like that of 
France there can be revolution, but against a muni- 
cipal tyranny owning the polls, controlling the 
courts, managing the finances and masters of the 
party organization, frequent elections prevent re- 
volt, and there is nobody to assassinate. 

I may be criticised for saying that the processes 
of liberty can be made more tyrannical than the 
edicts of a Czar, but you all remember in the mar- 
vellous revelations of the Lexow committee that 
widow whose friends contributed a few hundred 
dollars for her to have a cigar store with which to 
support herself and her four children. She kept 
house in one room and sold her cigars in the other; 
she sent her children to the public school, and she 
was doing everything which a. good, virtuous, mas- 
terful, motherly woman could do to bring a family 
up respectably and keep out of the poor-house. The 
ward policeman wanted the contribution which she 
could not pay. Refusing, she was haled to the 
police station, taken before the police judge, and 



38 

sent to the penitentiary for six montlis, and when, 
on her release, she returned to her home she found 
her little stock of goods had been divided among the 
ministers of the law and her children had dis- 
appeared. It only required a policeman, a captain 
and a police justice to make possible an outrage 
which could not be perpetrated in any other country 
or in any other city in this wide world. Xow civil 
service in municipal affairs makes this sort of crime 
impossible. Masterful men will always be leaders. 
They will always have a following, they will always 
be dominant in the control of party organizations, 
but under civil service there will be no thousands 
or tens of thousands of retainers supported out of 
the city treasury to defeat the taxpayers who pay 
them. These officers will be relieved from party 
pledges and party control, and the leaders must ap- 
peal to the people. There will always be leaders 
and so I say, " All hail the leader who, like Andrew 
Jackson, or Henry Clay, or James G. Blaine, or 
William E. Gladstone, the people can follow." 

And now, gentlemen, the year having proved so 
eventful, I have been struck with the questions 
which are brought to me by the interviewer. I have 
found that if you wish to know what the people ai*e 
talking about it is first developed by the man with 
the pad and pencil who drops into your house or 
office and wants your opinion on it. Two questions 
seem to have been started suddenly, and each as- 
sumed at once world-wide importance. The first, 
from the hitherto unknown Dr. Nordau, of Germany, 
is: "Is the world degenerating?" The second is 
Bismarck's wonderful remark in his eijihtieth-birth- 



39 

day speech, that he never received any happiness 
from his successes. I beg leave to differ with both 
of these eminent men. The facts which I have just 
recited show that the world is not degenerating, and 
Bismarck, when he made the startling observation 
that success brought no happiness, ignored the fact 
that his success had brought to him on his eightieth 
birthday the homage and devotion of the German 
peoples, not only in their own land, but wherever 
they might be all over the world; that this homage 
was received for his success in establishing German 
unity, and for his success in illustrating the possi- 
bilities of German brains and German energy and 
what they could accomplish, and that this tribute 
of love and affection and veneration, coming from 
all over the world, gave to him on his eightieth birth- 
day more happiness than had been concentrated in 
all the days and all the years of his past existence. 
" Is the world degenerating? " says the newspaper 
interrogator. Certainly it is not in the liberties 
which are being gained for the people, because they 
are increasing year by year. Certainly it is not in 
the education which is afforded by the Government, 
for that is enlarging and becoming better all the 
time. Certainly it is not in standards of morality. 
Twenty-five years ago Palmerston was Prime Minis- 
ter of England and Disraeli the leader of the oppo- 
sition. Palmerston at eighty had been detected in 
an intrigue of which the proofs were clear and posi- 
tive. The party leaders went to Diraeli's and said: 
" Let us drive him from office." Disraeli's answer 
was: " If you start that movement, I resign, because 
it will lead to his becoming so popular that he will 



40 

remain permanently in power." Ten years afterward 
the same thing- drove Dilke from public life, and 
later did infinite injury to Parnell, and to-day there 
is no man in America or in England, in public life, 
Avho could survive the clear proofs of a violation of 
the Seventh Commandment. All these things, which 
are taken as evidences of degeneration, are simply 
the nineteenth century cleaning house for its new 
tenant, the twentieth century. There are always 
about the old house rubbish, unused furniture, old 
rags and the remnants of filth and disease. The good 
tenant is careful to remove these evidences which 
would reveal to the new one the family weaknesses 
and cause him to criticise the family habits. The 
nineteenth century is a good tenant and it is sweep- 
ing out fads and humbugs of every nature and de- 
scription. It is gathering them up and putting them 
in shape, either to bury or burn them. 

We have labor troubles, and yet with the various 
solutions of paternalism in governniont, of arbitra- 
tion, of co-operation and educational advantages 
bringing capital and labor nearer together, the nine- 
teenth century bids fair to solve the problem before 
the twentieth century comes in. We have had our 
stage flooded with plays which made the heroine 
anything but wliat she ought to be, until the play- 
wright believed that without such a heroini^ the ])lay 
was imi»ossible, ami we liave simply brought her out 
in the (•h)sing years of the century to expose her 
hideousness in order that the twentieth might not 
find her in the house. We have had aestheticisiu and 
have nillivalcd it, aii<l praised it, jiiul lionorcd it, 
and liiiallv, wlicii we found il was fiUli covered witli 



-11 

flowers, we have buried it in a felon's cell with Oscar 
Wilde, ^^'e have had our literature, which the Ger- 
man scientist especially deprecates, where the good 
old novel which amused and inspired us and brought 
us in contact with humanity and with nature for the 
betterment of our mind and soul was succeeded by 
the modern experiment. The new novel came from 
Zola and Tolstoi and Ibsen and their like. It came 
to preach doctrines. The new novel bored us with 
sermons, and sent us to bed with the headache, be- 
cause of problems and possibilities which threatened 
the disruption of society, of the family and of all in 
which we had invested our hearts, our hopes and our 
future. The closing hours of the nineteenth century 
are getting rid of those novels by rushing frantically, 
with outstretched arms and mouths wide open, to 
human nature, humble, fascinating, plain, common, 
human nature in Trilby. 

The transparent lesson to us of the closing hours 
of the nineteenth century is that while the century 
dies, we should live as long as we can. We can only 
live by getting out of life all there is in it. What is 
happiness, anyway? While I do not discredit the 
future world, but, on the contrary, believe in it, ac- 
cording to the doctrines of the Church which I at- 
tend, yet we do not personally know, either from 
those who have come from the other world, or from 
revelations received from there, precisely what is the 
happiness of the next world. Our problem is not so 
much to long for that as to find our Imppiness here. 
Where is it? It is in a healthy mind, a healthy soul 
and a healthy bod}', and even if your body is not 
healthy, you can keep the other two in fair condition. 



42 

The secrets of happiness and longevity, in my 
judg-ment, are to cherish and cultivate cheerful, 
hopeful and buoyant spirits. If you haven't them, 
create them. Enjoj' things as they are. The ragged- 
est person I ever saw was a Turkish peasant stand- 
ing in the field, clothed in bits of old carpet. But the 
combination of color made him a thing of beauty, if 
not a joy forever. Let us never lose our faith ia 
human nature, no matter how often we are deceived. 
Do not let the deceptions destroy confidence in the 
real, honest goodness, generosity, humanity and 
friendship that exist in the world. They are over- 
whelmingly in the majority. I have lost twenty-five 
per cent, of all I have ever made in loaning money 
and endorsing notes, and have incurred generally 
the enmity of those I have helped because I did not 
keep it up. But every once in a while there was 
somebody who did return in such full measure the 
credit for the help that was rendered, that faith was 
kept alive, and the beauty and the goodness of our 
human nature were made evident. 

I have appointe<l about one thousand men to office 
and employment which gave them support and the 
chance to climb to positions of greater responsibility 
and trust if they had the inclination and ability. 
About nine out of every ten of them throw stones at 
me because I did not do better for them, and keep 
pushing them, and yet there are a hundred or so who, 
by the exercise of their own ability, their own grasp 
of the situation, have gone on to the accomplishment 
of such high ambitions and successes, and have ap- 
preciated in so many ways the help extended to them 
by helping others, that again my faith in luimau 



43 

nature remains undiminished. And my last recipe 
for happiness is to keep in touch with the young. 
Join in their games, be a partner in the dance, romp 
the fastest and turn the quickest in the Virginia reel 
or the country dance, go up to the old college and sit 
down and light your pipe and sing college songs, 
take the children to the theatre and howl with them 
at the roaring farce, and laugh with them at the 
comedy and cry with them at the tragedy, be their 
confidant in their love affairs, and if they are not 
equal to it, write their love letters, and never stop 
writing some for yourself. 

Thus, gentlemen, will the twentieth century, with 
its clearer purposes, its higher endeavor and its lim- 
itless opportunities, welcome us older fellows as the 
youngest and most vigorous of those who are to solve 
its problems and make its record. 



Address of Hon. Cliauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

the Birthday Dinner given to him by the 

Montaulv Club of Brooklyn, April i8, 1896. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen: 

Words would be inadequate for me to express my 
profound appreciation of this continuation of your 
annual compliment. The large number and the dis- 
tinction in every walk in life of the gentlemen who 
participate in this courtesy give to it more than 
individual or local significance. It seems to me to 
be a platform upon which can be expressed, vrith 
frankness and freedom, opinions upon all questions. 
We may be of one great party or the other in poli- 
tics, or of no party; we may be of any sect in reli- 
gion, or of no profession, and yet a fair treatment of 
any subject in the field of inquiry or controversy is 
received in the broadest and most catholic spirit. 
The discussions which, serious or festive, have 
marked this occasion in former years, have been 
attended afterward by extraordinary results in 
municipal and state affairs. We have had tlie full- 
est proof that the truth, sown ever so carelessly, if 
it falls in proper soil, bears ever the most generous 
fruit. 

We are again, as we were four years ago, in a 
presidential year. We will all admit that the con- 
ditions are reversed. Then the handwriting was 
upon the wall which marked the success of the oppo- 
sition over the party which had held power in the 



46 

government for a generation. Then we all felt that 
there was to be a condemnation of the system of 
protection as a principle of public policy, and the 
trial, in some form, of the theory of free trade. We 
all knew that the craving for more currency would 
find expression either in the actual debasement of 
the currency or in a combination of forces so power- 
ful and so threatening as to endanger the continu- 
ance of settled standards. But the handwriting is 
equally clear upon the wall to-day that there is to 
be another trial, and a vigorous one, of the i)rinciple 
and practice of protection; that there is to be a 
defeat, and an overwhelming one, of the friends of 
fiat money, of a debased currency or of the free 
coinage of silver. 

Rapid as has been the progress of the century, 
fast as has been the pace of the half century and 
great as have been the evolutions and revolutions of 
the last quarter of a century, none have been more 
significant or more pregnant with results to our 
country than the story of the last four years. It 
will stand by itself as one of the most interesting 
chapters when the future historian comes to write 
the history of the people of the United States during 
the nineteenth century. The retirement from power 
of the Republican party after thirty years of rule was 
an event of no ordinary importance; the advent into 
the possession of every department of our govern- 
ment of the Democratic party and its allies was an 
event of extraordinary interest. These four years 
will be remarkable for the culmination in them of 
the fads and theories which have come to the front 
since the civil war. Fiftv vears from now the story 



will read like a romance of the rise of the Populist 
part}^, its wild, vague, impossible and impracticable 
theories, the singular public men whom it threw to 
the surface, its capture of several states and its 
ability to hold the balance of power in the Congress 
of the United States, and then its disintegration 
and dissipation almost as rapidly as it was organ- 
ized. After three years of stormy life and untimely 
death we may apply to it the epitaph upon the tomb- 
stone of the infant, " if so soon I was to be done for 
what on earth was I begun for? " 

Not less interesting will be the history of the 
movement in favor of the free coinage of silver and 
the great proportions which it assumed. It was but 
a year ago that it controlled all the southern states, 
all the states between the Missouri river and the 
Pacific coast and had a strong foot-hold in the 
northwest. It frightened the politicians of both 
parties; it forced recognition in both of the national 
platforms and drove into silence or acquiescence 
most of our statesmen of national reputation. The 
publicist who reviews the period and seeks the 
causes of the extraordinary prostration of indus- 
tries, suspension of business and paralysis of em- 
ployment and labor during the last three years, as 
he comes to consider how much want of confiden(!e 
and weakening of credit had to do with it, will 
assign a large place among the factors of the prob- 
lem to this powerful and aggressive movement. 
While I differ widely from President Cleveland on 
almost every part of his public policy; while I think 
that his theories, so far as they have been practically 
-carried out, have been disastrous, and if wholly car- 



4S 

ried out would have been fatal to our industries, never- 
theless in the frankness and the fairness of this plat- 
form it is due to liim to say that the rout of the free 
coinage of silver policy and the energizing of the 
national credit by the triumph of sound money are 
more largely due to his throwing upon that side, 
with magnificent courage and ability, the whole 
strength and power of his great office and of his 
administration than to anything else. 

While we have had a period of distress which has 
brought so much suffering to millions of homes, and 
while the cost has been more than that of a disas- 
trous war, yet the suffering has not been in vain and 
the cost has not been lost if it shall have gained for 
us in education by discussion and by the experience 
of our people the death of the absurdities of populism 
and the triumph of that sound money and unques- 
tioned currency which shall keep this great trading, 
business and commercial republic in honorable rela- 
tions vrith and in the lead among the great trading, 
business and commercial nations of the world. But 
that will not be its only compensation. The experi- 
ence of the last twelve months has enforced the les- 
sons of the necessity of stability in the diplomatic 
service, of training for the difficult art of diplomacy 
and of a foreign office Avhich shall have in its per- 
manency and in its power both the confidence of 
Congress and the country and the ability to cope 
with dignity and honor with every question which 
affects the relations of the United States witii for- 
eign governments. 

We do not differ as to the Monroe Doctrine, as 
explained by Monroe and Jefferson and Madison 



49 

and Webster and Calhoun, being the settled policy 
of the country, to be sustained at every cost and 
every sacrifice. We do not differ in the sympathy 
and the practical measures possible to support it, 
which should be given to the suffering Christians of 
Armenia, and the stoppage of the horrible massa- 
cres taking place in that territory. We do not 
differ in the feeling we all have that the pro- 
consular government of the Eoman Empire of its 
distant provinces, with its despotic authority and 
crushing exactions, ought no longer to exist any- 
where in the world, and especially in our neighbor- 
ing state, the Island of Cuba. But at Washington 
these most delicate, most grave and most difficult 
questions have been met by resolutions and speeches 
which, in the language of diplomacy and the custom 
of foreign oflflces, mean a declaration of war. The 
magnificent revival of business, so hopeful for every 
industry, for every mill, for every factory, for every 
furnace, for every railroad, for labor and for wages, 
which began in the fall had become paralyzed by 
March by the country daring neither to invest nor 
employ nor to buy because of a continuing refusal 
to provide the government with the means for meet- 
ing its ordinary obligations in the time of profound 
peace, or buying great guns or building fortifica- 
tions for the protection of our coast and harbors, 
while at the same time Congress was practically 
declaring war every few days and calling to some 
power to come on and submit all differences, 
whether formulated or not, to the arbitrament of 
the sword. There must come out of the terrible cost 
of this method of diplomacy — a cost without results. 



50 

either in fame, or in territory, or measures, — a 
strengthening of our diplomatic service and our for- 
eign office, and there must also come the triumph of 
a movement begun within the year, and rapidly com- 
manding the confidence and support of the best 
sentiment of the civilized world, for the creation of 
a permanent international court of arbitration to 
which nations, and especially English-speaking na- 
tions, can with dignity and honor submit every 
question in dispute between them. It has become 
the habit to shout " coward!" and " commerce!'- and 
"business considerations!" and "lack of patriot- 
ism!" against every proposition which looked to the 
peaceful settlement of international questions and 
the avoidance if possible of the horrors and the sac- 
rifices in life and in treasure of a great war. But 
the Christian sentiment, the civilized sentiment, the 
manly sentiment, the patriotic sentiment of our 
country believes that it is not cowardly to have busi- 
ness prosperous, to have capital employed, to have a 
place for every laborer who desires to labor, to have 
wages remunerative and constantly increasing, to 
have happy times and peaceful lives, to have, if you 
please, good business, if they can be secured with 
honor to our country, without danger to our inter- 
ests, and by the peaceful process of arbitration or 
judicial decision. 

I have been impressed, during a recent tour over 
eight thousand miles, with the fact that we as Ameri- 
cans know less about each other than we do about 
foreign countries. Almost any intelligent person 
whom you meet is familiar with the industrial and 
social conditions of Great Britain, France, Germany 



51 

and Italy, and the knowledge of many of them 
extends to all the continents of the globe. Very few 
are familiar with the climatic, the agricultural, the 
industrial or the commercial conditions and pos^'si- 
bilities of the Gulf states or of that vast territory 
which extends from the boundaries of Oregon and 
California over thousands of miles of arid plain, with 
some beautiful oases of cultivated land, up to the 
Missouri river. Our country is so vast in extent, 
and capital, labor and competition have become so 
concentrated in crowded centers that we need a de- 
partment of government to teach congested popula- 
tions vrhere they can find air, health, wealth and 
liberty. Why should miners be starving in one ter- 
ritory when productive mines are calling for labor in 
another? Why should farmers, freezing in inclem- 
ent climates, or with their barns, their houses and 
their fences and their stock blown to pieces by resist- 
less blizzards, give it up and return again to the 
older settlements, when rich fields and alluring cli- 
mates wait for and want them? In the thousands 
of miles of the great American desert ten millions of 
people could live in prosperity and happiness under 
a scientific system of irrigation — such a system as 
only the government could inaugurate. Strange as 
it may appear the historian in looking over our cen- 
tury and citing the benefactions of our country will 
give a place, and a good one, to Brigham Young. 
Having stopped his caravan in the Salt Lake Valley 
with the mountains of snow encircling it and the 
alkali i)lains hard and dry and unproductive, he 
saw that if he brought the w^ater from the mountain 
and distributed it on the plain he could produce an 



52 

earthly paradise for liis co-religionists. He also 
discovered that the real secret of successful farming 
in a country of rich soil is the small farm which the 
farmer and his family can look after personally and 
attend to every detail. That principle has made 
Utah the most i^rosperous of the intermontane 
states and Salt Lake its largest city. 

Governor Flower tells of a farmer from Jefferson 
county who settled in the Northwest. In narrating 
to the Governor his experience he said that in order 
to resist the blizzard he built a snow fence four feet 
wide and six feet high. "When the wind blew it over, 
then the darned old fence was six feet wide and four 
feet high." I found this farmer in Texas where he 
had gone with his neighbors. They had demon- 
strated that rice could be profitably raised upon 
hitherto almost worthless prairie land and that lit- 
tle colony are now living in comfort and compara- 
tive affluence. We know so little of the magnifi- 
cent scenery, the unique succession of fertile valleys 
and the climatic and productive possibilities of Cali- 
fornia, because nature, always jealous of her treas- 
ures, has placed the Pacific ocean on one side of the 
golden coast and a thousand miles of desert on the 
other. The heat in that desert was a hundred and 
seven in the car in March, and Yuma is said to be 
the hottest place in the world. It is narrated of a 
soldier who died there, who was the wickedest man 
in the regiment, that he was buried with military 
honors and went to his proper place. A few days 
afterwards the commander of the garrison saw him 
walking about the camp and threatened him witli 
arrest, court-martial and execution for having come 



53 

back so unceremoniously after he had been properly 
mustered out. The soldier's excuse was that he had 
become so accustomed to the temperature of Ft. 
Yuma that he had come back for his blankets. After 
twelve hours of intolerable heat and suffocating dust 
the traveller comes almost instantaneously into a 
garden of roses, fields of evergreen alfalfa grass 
and groves of orange, lemon, peach and other trees 
filling the air with the perfume of their blossoms or 
ladened with golden fruit. The desert ends and 
paradise begins where irrigation has redeemed the 
sand and made it a fruitful mine of annual wealth. 
We met at one of the stations in the desert an origi- 
nal genius, a surviving product of earlier times when 
the west was wild and woolly. From saloonkeeper, 
cowboy and desperado he had become a justice of 
the peace, the fountain of the law and the keeper of 
the village grocery. He greeted me cordially, said 
he would have known me anywhere from my picture, 
and then frankly answered my question as what in 
his judgment were the two most important decisions 
in his judicial career. lie said: "The first was a 
man brought before me for shooting a Chinaman. 
I decided that there was nothing in the statutes of 
the state or of the United States that made it a crime 
to kill a Chinaman. And," said he, " when I read 
in our county paper the decision of the Supreme 
Court of the United States on the Chinese Exclusion 
Act I found that my opinion had been sustained by 
Chief Justice Waite. The other case was that of a 
man who fell into the gorge of the canon. In the 
discharge of my duty as a judge I sat upon the body 
and searched it. I found in its clothes fortv dollars 



54 

in money and a thirty-two calibre pistol. Under 
the laws of the state of Texas it is a misdemeanor 
to carry concealed weapons and so I fined the corpse 
the pistol and the forty dollars for violating the law 
and the court took possession of the property." 

The lesson of California is the marvellous differ- 
ence between the profit pro rata of large and small 
farms. We rode for thirty-five miles through one 
farm of a hundred thousand acres and through 
others of forty and fifty thousand acres. The large 
farmers as a rule were complaining of the low price 
of wheat, the comparative worthlessness of stock 
and the diseases in the vines of their vineyards. But 
every man we met who was growing oranges, 
lemons, apricots, prunes or olives upon ten or 
twenty acres and giving to the culture a personal, 
trained, educated and scientific attention, was aver- 
aging three hundred dollars an acre from orchards 
which were five years old. Upon these figures the 
mind is taxed to determine the number of families 
w^hich could live in unaccustomed comfort and in 
unequalled climatic conditions in California. I 
could not help contrasting my father's old farm up 
in Peekskill in the early days, with its annual crop 
of stones and taxes, with the gentleman whom I 
visited, whose cosy cottage was a home of comfort 
and culture and whose ten acres, with enough labor 
only to keep him healthy, yielded him three thou- 
sand dollars a year. Tie pressed the button, and 
then irrigation, good soil, the most heavenly of cli- 
mates and a Chinaman did the rest. 

We are naturally a boastful people and yet the 
better I know our couutry the more 1 am iuipressed 



55 

with our boundless basis for bragging. The language 
of exaggeration and metaphor seem inadequate to 
state the conditions for health, wealth and happi- 
ness in the United States when you add to them the 
possibilities of the future. Education and credit 
are the factors which will develop these possibilities 
and minimize the return of periodical disaster. The 
largest and the finest building in every town on the 
Pacific coast is a schoolhouse. And by credit I mean 
national credit with unquestioned stability, and 
assuring to enterprise and energy the results of their 
forecast and daring. The more I see and know of 
the United States the more I am an optimist. And 
the more I see and the better I know the men and 
women of our time the more I am a happy optimist. 
There are many secrets of perpetual youth, but one 
of the best, in the enjoyment which it gives to the 
increase of years, is faith — faith in the goodness of 
the times and the people who live in them, faith 
that the present is better than the past and faith 
that the future will be better than the present. The 
kiss with which we bid good night to our loved ones 
is sweeter far if accompanied with the belief that we 
shall greet them on the morrow with the kiss of a 
better day. 

We must have some faith even in our illusions. 
The Legislature has just exhibited it in solemnly 
enacting into law that a bicycle is not a vehicle but 
a trunk. We are always in danger if we go too far 
in doubt or experiment, as was exhibited in that 
mortuary poem of Cincinnatus which so delighted 
Dean Holme: 



56 

Little Willie from the mirror 

Sucked the mercury all off, 
Thinking in his childish error 

It would cure his whooping cough; 
At the funeral, Willie's mother 

Blandly said to Mr. Brown, 
It was a chilly day for Willie 

When the mercurj- went down. 

Well, gentlemen, we close to-night another year. 
May the cordial handclasp with which we met keep 
our hearts warm with the anticipation of another 
cordial and vigorous greeting for us all when next 
April comes around. 



Address of Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

tlie Birthday Dinner given to him by tlie 

Montauk Club of Brooklyn, April 24, 1897. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen : 

It is the privilege of every man to enjoy a birthday 
dinner. He generally gives it to himself, and invites 
a few friends to enjoy it with him. This was notably 
the custom for the last years of his life of General 
Sherman. Those unique and original entertain- 
ments live as the most pleasant memories of the few 
who were privileged to enjoy them. But it is a com- 
pliment and honor which I profoundly appreciate 
that so many friends should year after year unite in 
celebrating, in such hospitable and charming way, 
my entrance into the world. It develops egotism, 
not of the large-headed variety, but that healthy en- 
largement of the heart which cultivates and encour- 
ages one's love for and faith in his fellowmen. 

From the first this platform has been one of free 
speech. My hosts are men of all parties, of every 
walk, profession and business, and of all creeds and 
religions, and some of them of no religion. Sugges- 
tions partly humorous and partly serious have been 
made here which have aroused inquiries and started 
agitations leading to notable results in municipal 
and political affairs. 

There are two occasions in a man's life when the 
broad mantle of charity covers his utterances, and 
what might be imprudent or indiscreet at other 



5S 

times is for^jiven as an acknowledged liberty of the 
occasion. One is a speech at his marriage, in re- 
sponse to the toast to his bride and himself, and the 
other a speech on his birthday, in response to a 
pledge to his health, long life and happiness. So in 
reviewing the year I may be free with both comment 
and confession. 

Certainly the past twelve months have been the 
most revolutionary of the six years; whether the 
most reactionary, time alone can determine. As a 
confirmed optimist, I believe that out of the throes 
of every revolution come better politics, better gov- 
ernment, a broader understanding of the underlying 
principles of our institutions among the people and 
a permanent advance in prosperity and liberty. In 
the disappointment which has followed the election, 
because the impatient temperament of the American 
people demands instantly the fulfillment of promises 
and prophesies and results which can only come 
with new policies and their practical workings, we 
have discovered that nothing prospers but pros- 
perity. 

I have been an active worker upon the stump and 
in every practical way in politics ever since I was a 
voter. Only once before in any presidential canvass 
have I found old-time friends and foes working to- 
gether for the same candidate, as was the case in the 
last canvass, both among those who supported Me- 
Kiuley and those who followed Bryan. 

In looking calmly and philosophically over the 
past three years, and especially the past few months, 
one is impressed with the thought that as the world 
grows more practical it becomes more sentimental; 



59 

that as tho romance period vanishes and the knight- 
errant is no longer a hero, bnt a clown, the sordid 
aspirations of the world for bread and butter, for 
comfortable living, for the accumulation of fortune, 
are moved more by the imagination than bythe mind. 
A hundred years of coal as fuel, followed by fifty 
years of inventions which could be utilized and 
moved by cheap combustion, followed by the utiliza- 
tion of electricity for instantaneous communication 
around the globe, culminated suddenly, like the 
bursting of the cap from a volcano, in world-wide 
business catastrophies and calamities. Old methods, 
old handicrafts, the skill of the experienced artisan, 
the calculations of the farmer, and the forecast of 
the business man, were nullified or neutralized. 
Forty per cent, of the capital of the world was lost 
in machinery rendered worthless and products and 
enterprises w^hich had become useless by an evolu- 
tion more rapidly than the possibility of adjustment 
to its new condition. All civilized nations have felt 
the force of these radical changes of the utilization 
of powder, which so enormously increased and cheap- 
ened production, and of the quick contact of the 
products of semi-barbarous peoples, whose labor 
counts for little, competing in the markets with the 
products of those w^hom civilization and liberty have 
taught how to live. The adjustment has taken less 
than five years, against fifty years of evolution and 
revolution. The new era has furnished multiplied 
employments and taught new trades, so that pros- 
perity has generally followed distress. Certainly 
the great industrial nations like Great Britain, Ger- 
many and France, though they suffered severely for 



GO 

the three years before, have not been so prosperous 
for a decade as during the past year. Then why do 
we halt? We have more accumulated wealth than 
any other nation, we have seventy millions of peo- 
ple, whose intelligence, energy and enterprise put 
us in the front rank among nations. 

Our undeveloped resources are incalculable in 
their capacity to support great populations in com- 
fort and increase our national power. The South is 
as yet scarcely touched in its agricultural possibili- 
ties and mineral wealth. The arid territory under 
scientific and government irrigation is to furnish 
homes for millions, while the Pacific Slope presents 
ideal conditions for that paradise which has been 
the dream of the Utopian for centuries — easy living 
and opportunities for intellectual life upon ample 
income from a few acres. AVhile no nation ap- 
proaches us in these elements of prosperity, they 
prosper, but we as 3'et are struggling with indus- 
trial and financial difficulties. It is transparent that 
the obstacles are not in our material, our natural, 
our developed, our prospective or our educational 
conditions. The older countries, so fearfully handi- 
capped as they are with debts and standing armies 
and threatening wars and congested populations, 
have adjusted themselves to the revolution and the 
evolution of steam, electricity and invention, be- 
cause they did not have to struggle with the tools 
of exchange, with the fundamental principles of 
business and finance. We are like the superbly- 
equipped gladiator, who is sure of success, but who, 
in a contest with swords, hesitates whether he shall 
use a club or gloves. We have a banking system, 



61 

with the government as a partner, which fails to 
properly distribute to every section of the country 
the currency, and which puts the government and 
its credit at the mercy of Wall street flurries and 
gigantic speculations, and we have a continuous and 
undecided battle about our currency which casts a 
disastrous doubt in all the markets of the world 
upon old securities and new loans, so much needed 
for our development. We have every basis for 
credit, every condition for business, every require- 
ment for prosperity, even if the worst should come 
out of our muddle of finance and of currency. But 
the imagination of the hard-headed capitalist and 
money-lender, banker and financier, arouses the 
fears and so sways his judgment that they all say: 
" We will let our money lie idle, or we will invest it 
where the returns are the smallest, rather than ven- 
ture it upon the uncertainties of depreciation by 
government action or panic, because the government 
will persist in being a banker and may not be able 
to redeem its notes in gold." Give us an automatic 
system, by which the remotest parts of the country 
would, under business conditions, find the currency 
necessary for their wants; give us an assurance that 
our financial system shall be in harmony with the 
established standards of civilized countries; give us 
revenue sufficient to meet every necessity of the gov- 
ernment; let the government remit to legitimate 
channels, under proper safeguards, our mediums of 
circulation, and the stamping, rearing and impatient 
steeds of prosperity, loosed from these halters and 
hobbles, will bear a great people upon the chariot 



62 

of progress to unused heights, prosperity and happi- 
ness. 

Instead of solving our problem bj demonstrated 
processes, the acuteness and long continuance of our 
industrial depression have created temporarily a 
sentiment, cropping out all over the country, and 
finding expression in our Legislatures and in our 
courts, that property is a crime and capital a curse. 
The tie-up of an enterprise, or the crippling of a vast 
machinery of employment, which distributes money 
into numberless beneficent channels, is held as a 
blessing, while suggestion and effort remain dor- 
mant for the creation of conditions which will bring 
about that union of capital and labor, that extreme 
activity of both by which capital eagerly seeks the 
assistance of labor, and labor finds its full employ- 
ment and reward, by which the avenues are once 
more opened where American opportunity beckons 
American energy, ambition and genius for affairs to 
thrift, competence and fortune. 

As the result of legislation and interpretation, a 
blow has been struck at the railway system of the 
country, and through it at our internal commerce, 
which the railway managers are doing their best to 
meet and obviate its most injurious effects. On this 
point a few figures may be interesting. The rail- 
ways of the country pay out and distribute from 
their treasuries annually three times as nnuh money 
as does the United States government. The direct 
expenditures to their employes, and to those who 
produce the coal, oil, rails, fishplates, spikes, ties, 
cars and locomotives, support two millions of men, 
whose families number about ten millions more. 



G3 

During the recent campaign I traveled and spoke 
to enormous audiences all over the Western States. 
I found that there exists in many parts of the coun- 
try a singular and intense hostility to New York 
and to New Yorkers. It grows hotter as it ap- 
proaches the great continental divide, and disap- 
pears on the fruitful slopes of the golden coast. It 
is the outgrowth of the craze against the results of 
thrift, intelligence and prosperity. When one be- 
comes familiar with the great and disastrous change 
which has taken place in the agricultural conditions 
of this vast area, he can not help sympathizing with 
the man who can find no purchaser for his farm and 
no living market for the products of his farm. Under 
such conditions it is not the workingman who be- 
comes a socialist and a believer in every form of 
paternalism, but it is the man of small property, 
whether invested in the farm, or any kind of busi- 
ness which he has accumulated by great industry 
and rigid economies, and for which he cannot get a 
legitimate return. You or I, gentleman, if in a simi- 
lar situation, would be fighting whomever and what- 
ever seemed to be the enemy of our community or of 
our state. The vast industrial population of our 
commonwealth of Xew York disappears, to a dis 
tant people suffering so long from these business 
calamities, behind the glitter and the splendor and 
the gorgeousness, enormously exaggerated by pic- 
ture and description, of the palaces, the picture gal- 
leries, the services of plate, the banquets, the balls, 
the yachts and the extravagant pleasures of the 
wealthy of the metropolis. 



64 

I curiously investigated the antipathy to railway 
men in politics, which was so strong in 18SS that the 
chairman of one of the western state delegations at 
the Chicago Republican National Convention in- 
formed me that from president to brakeman every 
man in the employment of the railroad Avas debarred 
from public service, open to all other occupations, 
as a public enemy. There are a million railway vot- 
ers in the United States, and enough of them in every 
state, if the}' cared to act together, to vindicate their 
manhood or assert their rights as citizens, to change 
the politics of the state. A distinguished statesman 
said to me: "We want the votes of you railroad 
men; we like to have those of you who can speak, go 
upon the platform, and we especially love the con- 
tributions of those of you who can afford to give, but 
as candidates for office before the people, or for posi- 
tions after election, we are afraid of you." " But," 
I said, " you seem to make an exception in favor of 
some railroad men." His answer was: "Yes, but 
not those who have made their companies business 
and financial successes. If the manager or managers 
of a railway have made it insolvent, and put it in the 
hands of a receiver, they are eligible, because we 
think they can be regarded as the enemies of cap- 
ital." 

But, gentlemen, there is no power on earth, of 
Congress or of legislatures, bad laws on the statute 
book or worse ones to be put there, which can long- 
restrain American prosperity. Only let us know 
what the conditions are to be, and we will meet 
them, however bad; only give us a rest on any line 
for four years, and we will make that line a success. 



65 

The productive energies of the United States can be 
kept idle only a little longer. It may be the concert 
of Europe turning to a caterwaul ; it may be the un- 
expected in some great department of industry 
spreading to all others, but whatever the motive 
power, in spite of everything, we shall suddenly find 
ourselves again enjoying industrial prosperity. 

And now, to relieve the tension and contribute to 
the hilarity of the hour and the gaiety of nations, let 
us review the political experiences of the year. 
Though charged with both, I have neither a big head 
nor a sore one. One morning, on going out after my 
recent illness, I found that I could not get my hat 
on my head. I called my family and said, " The adu- 
lation of the press and the incense of applause, which 
is all that you have read to me while I was sick, has 
produced its natural result, and I have a swelled 
head." These practical-minded guardians sent for 
the doctor, who pronounced it belladonna poisoning, 
from atropine, which had been put in my eye, and 
said that the swelling was all on the outside. 

When General Woodford and I were in Washing- 
ton, just before the inauguration, we discovered that 
there were two places assigned to everybody — mis- 
sions or omissions. I remember Mr. Greeley storm^ 
ing about in great rage because witty Jim McQuade 
said that while Horace had made many Presidents, 
and more reputations, his reward had been to be the 
" Permanent Secretary of the Exterior, in charge of 
the Thermometer." 

I have been offered by Presidents cabinet positions 
and foreign missions, and my party in the state has 
tendered me, at various times, every honor in its 



66 

gift. Therefore I know from experience that neither 
republics, nor politicians, nor parties are ungrate- 
ful, nor can I be charged with anything but giving 
a bit of philosophy for the guidance of posterity in 
the few experiences I am about to tell you. Our peo- 
ple, as a people, love office, and seek it with avidity. 
In party conventions nominations go, as a rule, with 
great impartiality to those who have political value 
and political sagacity. In appointments, however, 
the appointing power, by the very necessity of the 
conditions which surround a President or a Gov- 
ernor, is moved largely by personal considerations, 
personal acquaintance and the confidences of per- 
sonal contact. I have had two experiences which 
charmingly illustrate this principle, both of which 
occurred when I was a young man. While still in 
the law office where I had studied after my admis- 
sion to the bar, I spent two months upon the stump 
in the presidential canvass. At its close I sat one 
night in the Delavan House, at Albany, with two 
most successful platform orators, who had been 
three months canvassing — witty and eloquent Jim 
Nye and eloquent General Bruce. " Well," said 
Bruce, " Jim, what will we get?" Nye said: '' We 
have worked too hard to get anything. It is the man 
who sits on the fence and criticises the worker who 
demonstrates his fitness for place." Neither of them 
got anything by appointment, but Bruce was fre- 
quently honored by the voters of New York, and 
Nye, moving to Nevada, came back to the United 
States Senate to give to that state a national and an 
international reputation. After the enactment of 
the international revenue laws, the able old lawyer 



67 

with whom I studied thought it would be a good idea 
for me to combine in the firm politics with law, by 
becoming an assessor of internal revenue. All other 
candidates retired, and the whole power of the state 
was put in the hands of the Judge, who went to 
Washington. The President said: "This appoint- 
ment seems perfectly clear. The support is unani- 
mous. I have heard something of the services and 
eloquence of this young man, and I will make the 
appointment." After some further conversation, he 
said : " By the way, what counties are in your dis- 
trict?" At the mention of Westchester, he re- 
marked: "Well, I am very sorry, but I promised 
that place yesterday." As the party powers in the 
state and congressional district had presented no 
one but myself, the Judge inquired, " To whom?" 
The President named the man, when the delegation 
said in astonishment, " Why, he is a Democrat, and 
has always been, and vigorously opposed your elec- 
tion!" " Yes," said the President, " but years ago, 
though a perfect stranger, at a Western hotel, he 
nursed a near relative of mine through an attack of 
the smallpox, when everybody else fled, and, from 
the character of that service, I think him to be a 
man who would properly and faithfully fill this posi- 
tion." The nominee speedily changed his politics, 
and proved to be an efiicient officer. To test the 
loyalty of Johnson, the two Senators and the dele- 
gation in Congress, the State Committee, the Gov- 
ernor and the Eepublican members of the Legisla- 
ture pressed upon the President my nomination for 
the Collector of the Port of New York. The position 
was more important then than now. The emolu- 



68 

ments were |150,000 a year in fees, and the patron- 
age made the collector largeh'the arbiter of the party 
organization in the State of New York. It also gave 
him great influence in the Senate and House of Rep- 
resentatives. The President sent for Secretary of 
State Seward, Senator Morgan and Representative 
Henry J. Raymond on Sunday morning and said to 
them, " This presentation is so phenomenal that I 
have concluded to appoint Mr. Depew, and I sent for 
yon to inform you and to say that the nomination 
would be transmitted to the Senate to-morrow morn- 
ing." He even went so far as to have the papers 
made out and signed. The next morning, early, Pro- 
fessor Davies, of West Point, who was urging his 
brother, the distinguished Chief Justice of our Court 
of Appeals, for the place, hearing of this, got access 
to the White House, and persuaded Johnson to defer 
action. Soon after came the trouble over the Civil 
Eights bill between the President and Congress, and 
six months later the President appointed to the 
place Mr. Smyth, a successful merchant of New 
York, who, like most of his associates, was an active 
critic of politics and politicians, but seldom took 
enough interest in elections to vote, and had no at- 
tachments which were binding to any party. 

That a foreign mission is not a bed of roses or a 
decoration which can always be worn with increas- 
ing pleasure, I can establish by a story which I 
never before have publicly told. I found on the 
steamer going to Europe one summer that brilliant 
advocate and eccentric genius, Emory Storrs. Every 
such man has a fad and the fad of Storrs was to have 
three hundred and sixty-five different colored neck- 



69 

ties, one for each day in the year. He was going 
abroad for the first time. He had been disappointed 
in securing the position of Attorney-General, 
but the President had immensely gratified him 
by signing a passport, given by the State De- 
partment and written on parchment, commending 
him as a distinguished citizen to the representa- 
tives of our government all over the world, and also 
giving him a commission as special envoy to treat 
with the British government upon the regulations 
which they had made against the introduction of 
American cattle. Storrs would come on deck every 
day, in the afternoon — for Neptune was his superior 
on the ocean, and demanded from him frequent 
tribute — wearing a new necktie, and taking out of 
his pocket a waterproof envelope, produce from it 
the passport and his commission, solemnly read both 
of them to me, and then inquire what I thought 
would be the effect of these documents, when exhib- 
ited abroad, upon the worn-out monarchies and 
effete aristocracies of the Old World. Then would 
follow a series of those inimitable anecdotes, inimit- 
ably told, for which Storrs was famous. On the last 
day of the voyage, as we were sailing into the port of 
Liverpool, Storrs, repeating this performance, said: 
" It is not the worn-out monarchies and effete aris- 
tocracies of Europe that I am after, but it is old 
Lowell. I understand that he never entertains 
Americans. I am going to make him give me a 
dinner and let me select the guests, or teach 
him that 'there is a God in Israel.'" James 
Kussell Lowell was mortified and mad that the 
functions of the minister of the United States, or any 



70 

part of them, should be transferred to this peripa- 
tetic diplomat, and vigorously denounced Storrs for 
his bad manners, when I sat beside him a few nights 
afterwards at dinner. Nevertheless Storrs carried 
his point, and when Lowell asked him, in fear and 
trembling, whom he wanted to meet, supposing it 
would be the royalties and the ambassadors and 
other impossibilities, to his delight and astonish- 
ment Storrs requested him to secure, as far as pos- 
sible, Tyndall, Huxley, Lecky, Tennyson and other 
great lights of science and literature, because he 
desired to meet, as he said, " Gentlemen of equal 
and congenial intellectual equipment." I did not 
hear of this at the time, but Storrs was again on the 
ship on our way home, and I said, " Storrs, did you 
get that dinner?" " Well," said he, " I will tell you. 
After three weeks I left London, and went upon the 
Continent. I was in that little room in the gallery 
at Dresden, absorbed, enraptured, almost translated 
before that marvelous Madonna of Eaphael. The 
room was croM^ded. Suddenly I felt that the crowd 
was looking at me, and not at the picture. I turned 
and said, ' Ladies and gentlemen, I have come three 
thousand miles to see this inspired painting, the 
most wonderful Avork of the brush the world has 
ever known. I suppose you came for the same pur- 
pose, and yet you are looking at me. If it is my 
clothes, they were made in Chicago.' A gentleman 
stepped forward and said to me, ' Mr. Storrs, you are 
more interesting to us Americans than any painting, 
however famous. You are the only American to 
whom our minister to England, Mr. Lowell, ever gave 
a dinner.' " To make a good story, Storrs did great 



71 

injustice to ttie most brilliant of our ambassadors to 
Great Britain, and the one who has left a reputation 
in London which increases with the years. Mr. 
Lowell was not only a brilliant ambassador, but was 
always a representative American. 

The hour grows late, and we enter upon the expe- 
riences of another year. I trust that for our country 
and for ourselves it may be one of prosperity and 
happiness. I never began the day after my birthday 
in more buoyant spirits or in more hopeful mood 
than I do this one. I thank Heaven that, in the acci- 
dents of birth, I was ushered into the world when it 
was still echoing with the songs of Easter, the songs 
of the glorious Kesurrection and of the promise of 
the sweeter and better life. In the period when the 
green grass hides and makes one forget the ravages 
of winter, when the trees are bursting into verdure, 
when the flowers and fruits are budding, when the 
birds are mating and the whole world is full of joy, 
of love and of hope, a man becomes an optimist in 
spite of himself, and in spite of anything that may 
happen to him. I know not w^hat may be your faith, 
gentlemen, and care not, because I accord to every 
man the right to enjoy his beliefs as I do mine, but 
my sainted mother, brought up in the strictest school 
of Calvinism, modified it in her sweet and angelic 
way. She believed that everything of importance 
which happened was a special act of Providence, 
and that while it might seem doubtful or dark for a 
moment, the compensation was sure to come. My 
experience in life, and my observations, have taught 
me the absolute truth of this doctrine. I see every 
little while men break down who are ten, twenty or 



72 

thirty years younger than myself, because of con- 
centration and anxiety; because of work and worry 
upon one line, in one way, on one thing. Work is 
health; worry is death. Life is an enjoyment of the 
work by which you live, and then a larger enjoyment 
of the work by which you contribute, as best you 
may, no matter under what discouragements or what 
criticisms, to the living, the enjoyment and the 
health of others. " Variety is the spice of life," is an 
old adage. Variety is generous living and longevity. 



Address of lion. Cliauncey M. Depew, LL. D., at 

the Birthday Dinner given to liim l)y tlie 

Montauk Club of Brooklyn, April 23, 1898. 



Gentlertien : 

It is a compliment as unique as it is gratifying that 
several hundred gentlemen, representing every de- 
partment of American thought and activity, should 
for seven years in succession, in constantly increas- 
ing numbers, tender me a birthday dinner. Coming 
here as you do — clergj^men, judges, lav^-yers, doctors, 
journalists, men of letters and men of business — to 
devote an evening to good-fellowship and some se- 
rious reflection, you illustrate that we Americans 
can escape from the shop and enjoy the pleasures of 
life. 

We have all of us listened to speeches nominating 
candidates for office and congratulating them upon 
their election, addresses presenting some significant 
gift or celebrating some honor which has come to 
the recipient, and we have either felt or philoso- 
phized upon the emotions of the man who is thus 
rhetorically decorated, but I take it tliat the blood 
never feels the electric touch of joy so keenly or 
conveys it so rapidly to the brain as when, with en- 
thusiasm and spontaneity, the crowd rise and joy- 
ously gi^et him with that homely but most genuine 
of choruses, " For he is a jolly good fellow, which 
nobody can deny." 



Seven years are said to result in a complete physio- 
logical change in a human being, but, thank Heaven, 
it is only matter which changes. The Spanish adage, 
if Tve may quote from a Spaniard at this time, still 
holds true: "Old wine to drink, old friends to trust, 
and old books to read." It is appreciation, laudation 
and gratification like that which you give to-night 
which promote perpetual youth and fence out old 
age. 

Many subjects have been suggested at these annual 
gatherings. Some of them have been fruitful in po- 
litical consequences and in educational discussion. 
The past seven years have been rich and revolution- 
ary in the story of our country and the experience of 
our lives. The pace of progress has been too rapid 
for the world to adjust itself to the conditions which 
it has created. The war of conflicting opinions for 
remedies to meet the crises produced by the rapidity 
of modern development has produced great economic 
disasters and revealed the possibility of greater ones. 
The lesson of our whole experience has been that the 
American people possess resources in themselves 
and in their country to meet and overcome adverse 
conditions such as no people were ever blessed with 
before. The imagination cannot grasp the depths 
the breadth and the height of happiness which 
might have been attained if the obstacles in our way 
had not existed. The nemesis which halts ambition, 
humbles pride, and perpetually reminds humanity 
that it is mortal, since the beginning of these cele- 
brations in 1S92 has exhibited its power upon our 
enjoyment of the marvelous development which has 
been the pride and the boast of the last half century. 



iO 



We had lived in the exaltation of the results of in- 
vention and discovery. The best of all the preceding 
centuries seemed to have accumulated little com- 
pared with what has been done in the last wonderful 
fifty years by steam, electricity, discovery and inven- 
tion. But this slow-going, conservative world of 
ours could not immediately adjust its diverse races, 
its different civilizations and the historic develop- 
ments of its inhabitants in the several hemispheres, 
islands, and climates to the instantaneous competi- 
tion and neighborhood of conflicting interests pro- 
duced by the cable, the railroad and the steamship. 
When China and Canada, India and the United 
States, Egypt and South America, Russia and Aus- 
tralia, with rates of v/ages running from three 
cents to three dollars a day, the cost of living from 
comparatively nothing to figures demanding large 
income for support, the hours of work from eight to 
sixteen a day, the intelligence of the common school 
and high civilization as against semi-barbarism and 
ignorance, were brought in contact and competition 
in every market, the world's machinery was thrown 
out of gear. An industrial and financial cataclysm 
threatened the commerce, the capital and the em- 
ployment of the nations. No country escaped the 
effects of the panic produced by this contact with the 
yellow man and the black man, and the products of 
their labor in the field and factory, and with the 
currency which was their medium of exchange. The 
nations of Europe, with their longer experience, 
their more settled methods of business, and the solid 
basis of sound money upon which their credit was 
founded, speedily recovered and adjusted themselves 



TG 

to the new conditions, Since then there has been 
unexampled prosperity in Great Britain and on the 
continent. We have been struggling to make some 
adjustment and enter, as we can, moi^e successfully 
upon tJie highways of trade and prosperity, but our 
difficulties have been exceptional and unusual. Our 
very difficulties have illustrated the elasticity, the 
strength and the hope of American prosperity. We 
have had a continuing currency crisis and the com- 
mercial disturbances and partial pai'alysis of two 
wars. President Cleveland's Venezuelan message 
and the panic which ensued suspended all the activi- 
ties of the country for a considerable period, and 
gave every enterprise a setback, or so crippled it that 
years were required to repair the damage. There is 
no doubt that the time had come for a' declaration of 
the full meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. There is 
no doubt but that the emphatic assertion of the pro- 
tecting interest of the United States over the weaker 
republics of the two Americas was notice to Europe 
of our position which will prevent future interfer- 
ence and trouble. Thus, as we look back upon the 
incident. President Cleveland performed a signifi- 
cant service for his country. 

In the same manner events have culminated in 
Cuba and with Spain in such a way as compelled 
action by the United States. The conduct of the ne- 
gotiations by the President, and the dignified and 
impregnable position in which he has i)laced his 
country, are at once a source of patriotic pride and 
of future safety for the United States. A new and 
glorious chapter in American dii>lomacy, the human- 
ity of the American people and the mission of liberty 



77 

on this side the Atlantic has been written and acted 
by President McKinley. 

All our power and resources must be energized for 
a short, thorough and decisive campaign and victory 
in the war upon which we have entered. But with 
the Cuban irritation, which has imperilled our inter- 
ests, threatened our ti'anquility and been a constant 
menace to our peace for half a century, allayed, by 
Spain out and Cuba free, the future is brilliant with 
promise and hope for our country. The nations will 
understand an American position which the United 
States can maintain by overwhelming power. No 
complications upon which hostilities could be based 
can happen thereafter within the sphere of our influ- 
ence in the western hemisphere. The advice of 
Washington to his countrymen becomes both pro- 
phetic and mandatory — prophetic in the enlargement 
of its original meaning, that we should not become 
entangled with foreign powers by excluding from 
the word foreign everything American; mandatory 
in its prohibition of our meddling with the affairs of 
peoples on the other side of the great ocean, and con- 
fining our energies and our minds to the development 
of the destiny which God intended should be benefi- 
ciently worked out by isolation of the North Ameri- 
can continent and adjoining islands from neighbor- 
hood, association and traditions with the Old 
World. 

Our home difficulties and dangers brushed away, 
the mission of America is pre-eminently for peace. 
I know that this sentiment is vigorously opposed. 
I have a friend who is an earnest, enthusiastic and 
conscientious jingo. He is not of the noisy and ora- 



78 

torical sort, who try to promote war to be fought out 
by their neighbors while they stand in safe places 
and shout, but he asks nobody to follow where he is 
not willing to lead. My friend has been a gallant 
soldier, and has performed excellent service in pub- 
lic life. He believes that the national spirit, higher 
patriotism and pure and unselfish love of country 
must be stimulated by at least one war in each gen- 
eration. He thinks that the industrial disturbances 
and distresses which follow hostility are like the 
spring doses of blue pill in the old practice, neces- 
saiw to purge the body politic from gross material- 
ism. Following the lines of the old practice, he be- 
lieves that occasional blood-letting is necessary to 
political health. I say to my other and oratorical 
jingo friend, " Suppose you bring about your war in 
each generation — will you enlist? " He says, " Of 
course not; my mission is that of the statesman — to 
advise." " But," I persisted, " suppose your country- 
men follow your example. What then? " " Then," 
he said, " the Government should draft the beggars." 
But my friend, the Colonel, says, " I will head the 
enrollment with my own name and move at once into 
camp." I differ in foto from tliis theory of the mission 
of the people of the United States. I believe that the 
true greatness of our nation will be manifested by 
education, ait, science and industry. Let the con- 
ditions in our western hemisphere be established as 
I have indicated, and then let our financial situation 
be removed from the stage of often tried and as often 
exploded experiment unworthy our genius for com- 
merce and finance, and our past, wonderful as it is, 
will seem but the stepping-stone to the gTeater fu- 



79 

ture. There is no reason why we should have a panic 
inside of every decade which sweeps thousands into 
bankruptcy and hundreds of thousands into pauper- 
ism. There is no reason why every flurry of politics 
at Washington should suspend the purchasing power 
of the nation. There is no reason why the govern- 
ment should be at the mercy of speculators on its 
credit, and be subject to an accident to its specie 
payments of its notes which in a night and a day 
stops orders to the factory, and then from the factory 
stops orders to the mine, because the merchant dare 
not lay in stock and the customer dare not buy. We 
have experienced in the last seven years nearly an 
annual panic or industrial revolution producing 
misery and distress almost as great as those which 
are suffered in war. 

England spends a thousand millions of dollars a 
year to purchase food for her labor. We raise all the 
food needed for our seventy millions of inhabitants, 
and send abroad to other nations more than a thou- 
sand millions of dollars' worth of our surplus. The 
product of our factory meets all our necessities and 
most of our luxuries, and the perfection of our ma- 
chinery, the power given us in such abundance by 
nature, and the intelligence of our artisans are open- 
ing for our manufactures the markets of the world. 
The disturbance of these relations and conditions 
throws out of employment millions of people and 
puts into the dire distress of poverty, with all that 
means of deprivation of comfort and of the pleasures 
of life, many other millions who are dependent upon 
the wage-earners for their support. Call it gross 
materialism, call it cowardice, name it what you 



80 

please, I am heart and soul for the policy which en- 
ergizes the forces of production and promotes na- 
tional and especially individual prosperity and hap- 
piness. Keep the path clear by the application of 
the ordinary principles of prudence, thrift and, I 
will add, patriotism, then I predict that our country 
will be more tlian a marvel ; it will be a miracle. Tke 
farmer can lift his mortgage, and make his home the 
castle which neither the sheriff nor care can enter; 
the workingman can own his home and feel the inde- 
pendence of an unencumbered hearthstone, and every 
occupation, every employment, will be seeking those 
who are willing and capable. The successes of the 
men of mark in the past, which are the guides and 
inspirations of the boys of to-day and of the future, 
will be repeated in more frequent examples. This is 
not the peace of the army of Hannibal, losing 
stamina, nen^e and courage amidst the luxuries of 
Southern Italy; it is not the peace of sloth nor of 
enervating idleness, but it is the peace which makes 
strong, healthy and well-developed men and women; 
the peace which builds upon industry and hope, dis- 
ciplined, cultured and well-filled minds; the peace 
which makes the nation so consciously strong that 
with no derogation of dignity it can go to the limit 
of patience to preserve peace and promote amity and 
friendship among nations; so really powerful that if 
the conditions are intolerable, and a war of right and 
justice must be maintained, its might will be as re- 
sistless as its cause is right. 

Spanish history presents the interesting condition 
that she has never been conquered by an iu-my of in- 
vasion, and, with the exception of Cortes and Pizarro 



81 

in the New World, has rarely, if ever, succeeded iii 
her foreign wars. Her eighty-three years of contest 
in the Netherlands ended in defeat, and her famous 
armada was lost in the British Channel. Her con- 
tests with her colonies have always ended in dis- 
aster. Her wars have been frequent, and most of 
them for aggression or oppression. ' 

A curious incident in her history illustrates that 
war seldom settles anything, and especially illus- 
trates that any nation which goes to war should be 
sure that the facts upon which it bases its 
action are impregnable. When W^alpole was 
Prime Minister of Great Britain, the relations 
between Great Britain and Spain were strained 
on the question of right of search upon the ocean. 
Captain Jenkins, who was master of an English 
schooner, arriving home reported that while near 
the coast of Cuba he was captured by a Spanish 
cruiser; that the Spaniards cut off one of his ears, 
and then let him go with his ship, Jenkins had car- 
ried this ear around for some years wrapped up in 
cotton to exhibit to audiences. The House of Com- 
mons took up the matter, and Captain Jenkins testi- 
fied before its committee that, when his ear was cut 
off, he commended his soul to God and his cause to 
his country. The phrase took like wildfire, and all 
England was in a blaze. The Spaniards vigorously 
denied any knowledge of or connection with Jenkins 
or his ear, Walpole, the Prime Minister, did his best l^ 

to allay the excitement, to have the matter further 
investigated and to settle the trouble by diplomacy. 
Burke called the story " The Fable of Jenkins' Ear." 
Parliament, however, by an overwhelming vote, 



82 

promptly declared war against Spain. The war 
raged for three years. It cost thousands of lives, de- 
stroyed millions of dollai's of property and added 
millions to the national debt, upon which the people 
of England have been paying interest ever since. 
Peace was finally concluded by the combined efforts 
of all the nations of Europe. Then Walpole, the 
Prime Minister, in order to justify his opposition to 
the war, made an exhaustive investigation to dis- 
cover who had cut off Jenkins' ear, but where, when 
and how it was lost is still unsettled. 

One happy effect of the present crisis has been the 
removal of prejudice and the promotion of a better 
understanding between the United States and Eng- 
land. The friendship of the English people for us 
during the Spanish controversy has done more to 
arouse like sentiments on this side of the ocean than 
anything in the history of the two countries. Amer- 
ica and Great Britain are nearer to-day to that alli- 
ance of English-speaking peoples which has been the 
idea of many statesmen and the dream of all men of 
letters of both countries than at any time in a hun- 
dred years. 

This is a bright and beautiful world, and iu all ages 
men and women have tried to liud out how to escape 
misery and to secure happiness. Observation and 
reflection have taught me that happiness is possible 
to everybody who seeks it rightly. Xo one at least 
is anxious to climb the Golden Stairs, although we 
are often quite willing that many whom we know 
should try the experiment. I heard Horace Gi-eeley 
once remark to a clerical collector, who had inter- 
rupted his composition of an editorial, and was de- 



83 

manding a contribution on the ground that it would 
save several millions of human beings from going to 

hell, that he would not give a d cent, because 

there did not half enough go there now. 

Whenever I have spoken of the enjoyments of life, 
and the pleasures possible in every condition, the 
criticism has been made that my point of view was 
too narrow, and from a basis of continued life-long, 
personal prosperity which unfitted me to understand 
the limitations of the ordinary wage-earner. This is 
not the case. Happily for me my father, a successful 
man, with an iron will and a fixed purpose, having 
given me a university education and a profession, 
threw me out, with the remark that I would never 
have another dollar from him, except in his will. 
But for that apparent cruelty on his part we would 
not be here to-night. There was not a hard line pos- 
sible in the experience of early struggles which did 
not come to me. The old gentleman would sit in his 
room with the tears rolling down his cheeks at my 
difficulties and hardships, but he never relented nor 
rendered one particle of assistance. Twice, through 
over-confidence in friends and a fatal weakness for 
indorsements, my accumulations have been swept 
away, and a load of debt assumed. It was after all 
these struggles and misfortunes that a rule of life 
was suggested, the results of which have been so 
happy that they easily form a code for enjoying ex- 
istence applicable to every condition in life. Old 
Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, has laid the world 
under the deepest obligations. A man of genius, cul- 
tured and educated, the fortunes of war had made 
him a slave to a brutal Eoman. It irritated the 



84 

Eoman that a man in such condition could still get 
vastly more pleasure out of life than he did with all 
his wealth and the opportunities given him by being 
a favorite at the court of Xero. Seizing the philos- 
opher and slave by the leg one day he commenced 
twisting it, when Epictetus said: " Stop. You will 
break that leg and injure your property." 

The leg of Epictetus w^as broken, but his cheerful 
stoicism conquered. He w^as given his liberty, and 
founded one of the great schools of antiquity. The 
underlying principle of his faith and teaching is that 
God knows what is good for us better than we do. 
Therefore, doing the best we can to attain our end, 
let U3 accept his disposition as the wisest, and be 
cheerful and happy whatever our lot. Most of us re- 
member with veneration and affection a sainted 
mother, deeply imbued with the sombre doctrines of 
Calvin. By the sweetness of her nature she gave to 
this same sentiment, reproduced in another form in 
the Genevan theologian, the beautiful and inspiring 
suggestion that both our successes and our disap- 
pointments were special providences working out 
for us the career to which we were adapted. I know 
that all of you can recall in your own experiences 
crises in your lives which demonstrated the truth of 
this principle. Several times you have been at the 
cross-roads of a career, bent upon moving to this 
place or that, upon joining this firm or that corpora- 
tion, upon accepting this position rather than an- 
other, upon making this investment or that. Some- 
thing prevented your accomplishing your purpose, 
and you were in the depths of gloom sometimes and 
sometimes despair; but as you look back now you 



85 

find that had you been able to carry out your scheme 
or purpose, it would have so changed as to have prac- 
tically ended your prospects in life, and the choice 
which, against your will, j^ou were compelled to 
make, is the one that brings you here to-night, not 
only for this occasion, but to celebrate with thank- 
fulness and joy the good things which have come to 
you in life. Certainly my own career is rich in great 
disappointments which have proved significant 
blessings. 

The best informed, all-round man, and the most 
contented I ever knew^, was a barber. He was a 
success as a barber; he would have failed as a mer- 
chant. His shop kept him comfortably and furnished 
a surplus which, with great discrimination, he in- 
vested in a library, every book in which and every 
author in which was his intimate and familiar friend. 
He was the encyclopedia of his neighborhood to the 
preachers, the lawyers, and the students; and in- 
stead of wearying his customers with voluble sugges- 
tions as to his patent for restoring their hair on the 
outside of their heads, no customer ever left the 
chair without getting something of value lodged in- 
side of his head. 

Another man whom I watched from early boyhood 
to middle age was a carman in my native village who 
had a vital faith in the doctrine that whatever is is 
for the best and comes from on high, and though his 
troubles were many, his song in the street, as he 
trundled by with his load, was an anthem of joy 
ringing through the houses and fairly causing the 
clams in the bottom of his wagon to open their shells. 



-/ 



86 

His infectious hapi3iness, loudly proclaimed in the 
weekly prayer-meeting, lifted saints and sinners OQt 
of themselves to a closer contact with their better 
selves and a clearer vision of the Pearly Gates and 
the Golden Streets. 

One more instance is an old friend more than a 
quarter of a century my senior, who discovered thirty 
years ago that he had accumulated enough for his 
moderate wants. Investing it in securities which, 
though yielding low rates of interest, could by no 
financial convulsion cease to pay, he has resisted the 
most tempting offers to double his fortune. Released 
from the cares of his profession he has devoted his 
life to congenial literary pursuits, to music and art 
and travel. The most welcome of guests and cheery 
of companions, and hale and hearty near the nine- 
ties, he rejoices that he did not die as the fool dieth 
in the sixties. 

I have been often told that humor, anecdote, and 
wit are fatal to political progress or business appre- 
ciation. We all know that the solemn, the dull, and 
the obtuse man captures by the impenetrable dignity 
which walls in his mind and imagination popular 
plaudits for his supposed wisdom and strength of 
character. But looking back over my sixty-odd 
yeSrs, rather than anything of honor or fame or ap- 
plause that might have come from playing a false 
part, I rejoice in the belief that I never have con- 
sciously caused anyone to shed a tear, and have done 
my best, whether it was successful or not, to make 
people happy and cause them to laugh. The man 
who can honestlv laugh with his whole soul and his 



87 

whole being will never betray a friend, never defraud 
a creditor, never cheat his neighbor, never deceive a 
woman, but will go through the world making 
friends and, more diflScult still, keeping all the 
friends he makes. Carking care, of whom Ilorace 
speaks as always trying to ride behind us or on the 
game ship, has a hard time of it if we are determined 
to be cheerful and make others cheerful. It is pos- 
sible to carry home some good thing every day. It is 
a duty. The women of the family may have had 
great vexations and the children may be fretful with 
studies and other troubles. I have not for years 
passed the twenty-four hours at the office, or on the 
street, or on the cars that did not furnish the little 
drama or farce which carried off the home dinner 
and made the air ripple in the library after dinner. 
They need not be worthy of Thackeray, or Dickens, 
or Douglas Jerrold, or Artemus Ward, or Mark 
Twain. The honest intent gives infinite zest to an 
effort in the home circle. For instance, a Tammany 
Senator, who belongs to the school of Mr. Bailey, the 
Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, 
and had never worn a dress suit, comes into my office 
after the edict had gone forth that no Democrat 
could hope for recognition in New York unless he 
had on a dress suit in the evening, and says : " Mr. 
Depew, I went into the Democratic Club last night 
and one of our people, whose favor I value, said to 
me, ' Senator, I never saw you so well dressed in my 
life.' I said to him, 'Does it fit?' 'Splendidly.' 
'All right in the back? ' ' Yes.' ' Then I'll buy it.' 
" But," the Senator sadly said, " when I went into 



88 

the dining-room the master of ceremonies remarked 
severely, 'What are you doing with them tan shoes? ' 
Hully gee, Mr. Depew, don't tan shoes go among the 
Four Hundred with a dress suit? " Two shopping 
ladies from the Oranges are discussing loudly in an 
adjoining seat on the elevated car at which of the 
department stores the best lunch can be had, and 
with the lack of sequence produced by constant shop- 
ping, their controversy ends, not on the lunch, but 
on the day on which they had it. One says that she 
always pays her bills in checks, because then the 
check is a receipt. The other says, " I don't bother 
about giving my name and address, and maybe have 
the things come home all wrong, but I pay In cash 
and carry the bundle away with me." The first 
throws up her hands in horror and says, " How do 
you know they will not send out to you for collection 
a second bill? " It is difficult to estimate how much 
daily happiness is increased if the order is peremp- 
tory that, after you get home in the afternoon and 
until the next morning, no bad news shall be re- 
vealed or discussed. The tendency of the female 
mind is to gather news, and most of it relates to the 
IM^rsonal misfortunes of friends and acquaintances. 
If told at the dinner or in the early evening, with the 
sympathetic picturesqueness characteristic of the 
feminine artist in word-painting, we have a funeral 
instead of a feast. But if the warning finger — which 
means the taboo — rises whenever the death, or the 
divorce, or the bankruptcy or the scandal shows Its 
head, good digestion attends the simplest as well as 
the richest fare, and sleep, which means heaUh and 
life, follows a bright and joyous evening. 



89 

We all have fads and know it not though they are 
familiar to others. Let our friends practice theirs 
without rebuke. They may bore us at times, but 
think of Ihe exquisite pleasure they give those who 
are the victims of these harmless lunacies. Listen 
for the hundredth time to the adventure or the story 
and remember that Joe Jefferson's Eip Van Winkle 
or Booth's Ixichelieu never tire. Your reward will 
come in the happiness you give, and often in substan- 
tial form. When I was a young lawyer in Peekskill 
a New York dandy visiting the village cut me out. 
The fad of the father of the young lady was a theory 
which would have given the victory to Napoleon at 
Waterloo. I had heard the story often as a prelude 
to the love scene which followed the old gentleman's 
retirement for the night. W^hen my rival appeared 
one evening I said, " By the way, Mr. Brown, our city 
friend has never heard your very original and re- 
markable story of W^aterloo." When I left at eleven. 
Grouchy, having defeated Blucher, was just deploy- 
ing his army in the British rear, and Mr. Fifth Ave- 
nue never called again. 

I do not intend to tell stories to-night. I have had 
a warning. We are putting four new stories upon 
the Grand Central Depot. The other day a careless 
workman let a brick fall from the top. It landed on ^ 

the platform just outside my window, banged 
through the glass and missed my head by a sixteenth 
of an inch. Professor Hadley remarked, " Even the 
Grand Central Depot will not stand four of your 
stories." 

When Pyrrhus was flushed with victory a philo- 



90 

Sophie friend said to him, " When you have con- 
quered Italy, what then?'' "I shall conquer Africa." 
"And when you have conquered Africa, what then?" 
" I shall conquer the world." "And when you have 
conquered the world, what then? " " I shall take my 
ease and be merry." " Well," said his friend, " why 
not take your ease and be merry now? " Gentlemen, 
we are all of us engrossed in the cares of business; 
we are all of us absorbed in the conduct of our affairs 
because of the hot competitions of modern life. But 
that man is more successful in business, has a better 
judgment in critical affairs of the bank, a readier 
apprehension of the kaleidoscopic perils of railroad- 
ing and a clearer grasp of the problems of law or 
theology or medicine who can find time, and will find 
time, no matter what the nature of his vocation, to 
" take his ease and be merry, now." The fools who 
give the twenty-four hours to business, and boast of 
it, may criticise the man who can expel business 
from his mind and enjoy his books, his friends, bis 
club, the theatre, the opera, the dinner, or the dance, 
but the cheerful man gets dividends out of life where 
the other gets trouble. Such people are the Bour- 
bons of business. They neither learn nor forget, but 
they sometimes get temporary reputations. Some 
years ago I was on an inspection tour over all of our 
lines with a party of railroad men. We lived on the 
car, and all of us worked hard all day, and when 
darkness interrupted work the card table carried off 
the evening. Cards do not interest me, and so one 
night I delivered a lecture to the students of a college 
in the town where we were stopping, and another 



91 

night I spoke at a supper of the Loyal Legion, and 
another at a Convention of Kailway Employees, con- 
tributing as best I could to the life of the places we 
visited. The writers on railway subjects in the press 
praised the skill and practical talents for their busi- 
ness and the scientific methods of my friends who 
found rest and recreation in the game, and lamented 
that such vast interests should be in charge of a theo- 
rist and speech-maker like myself. Our daily labors 
were the same and our methods of spending the even- 
ing were different, but no one ever heard of the card- 
playing amusements of my associates, and my 
speeches were in the newspapers. It was that prince 
of utilitarians, Lord Chesterfield, I think, who ad- 
vised that for success in life good form is better than 
good character, and appearances than merit. 

The gray matter of the brain is like a rubber band. 
Stretch it continuously and keep it strained and the 
elasticity goes out of it, and it rots and falls to 
pieces. Wise judgment must be fertilized by variety, 
versatility and travel. My graveyard of reminis- 
cence is full of the buried bones of those who gave 
out and failed in the '30s, the '40s, or the '50s, because 
they planted by night and reaped by day, because 
even the church service was simply helping to solve 
their business problems, and because they sedulously 
avoided and scrupulously denounced frivolous peo- 
ple like ourselves, who can frivol as we do here to- 
night. 

Gentlemen, the mortuary tables of the men who 
for eight years have gathered here on my birthday 
would enrich any life insurance company. None of 



92 

us grow old, none of us decay, and our sentiment to- 
night is, that better than medical faculties and phar- 
macopoeias and dispensaries and mineral springs are 
cheerful dispositions, persistently cultivated and 
kept alive, no matter what the obstacles in their way, 
and the joys of life extracted from every situation — 
public, business, domestic and social. 



Address of Hon. Chauncey M. Depew, LL D., at 

the Birthday Dinner given to liim by the 

Montauk Club of Brooklyn, April 22, 1899. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen : 

Since nobody wishes to die everybody must be 
glad he was born. It is a good thing to have a birth- 
day, but its pleasure is increased when your friends 
in this substantial way indicate their joy that you 
came into the w^orld. Artemus Ward said: "It 
would have been ten dollars in the pocket of Jeffer- 
son Davis if he had never been born." But the only 
limitation upon natal festivities is the necessity of 
making a speech. The difficulty increases when the 
occasion has called together a goodly company, the 
majority of whom have listened and cheered for 
eight successive years. Happily for me the life of 
an American is kaleidoscopic and the history of our 
country presents a perpetual succession of new and 
interesting pictures. Certainly the last twelve 
months form an epoch in the story of nations. 

Heretofore you have honored me as a private citi- 
zen. But to-night you greet me both as the same old 
friend and your representative in the Senate of the 
United States. I shall be most fortunate, if in this 
new sphere I am able, in a measure, to meet 
your partial expectations and predictions. Certainly 
I am absolutely free and untrammeled. I am proud 
of the railway profession in which I have spent my 
life, but I owe to it no obligations to favor it in any 



94 

way or to treat its interests in any other manner as 
a le^slator than all other questions which may come 
up for action. Public duty is very simple and not in 
conflict with any honest business. It is that what- 
ever is for the public good, is also for the good of 
every legitimate trade, occupation and business in 
the country. My long connection with the work and 
operations of the railroads has given me a healthy 
contempt for politicians who believe that they can 
fool the people by phrases denouncing the work and 
those engaged in it out of whom they make money in 
practice. The familiar form is the lawyer who de- 
rives his fees and his living from the retainers of cor- 
porations, and in legislative halls and on the plat- 
form covers them with indiscriminate abuse. An- 
other form is that which makes the vital business of 
legislation subordinate to stock speculation, the fluc- 
tuation of values and the undermining of credit. 
With an ingenious stock-broker, a shrewd lawyer 
and a skillful press agent the combination is com- 
plete. The bill is introduced, its advent heralded as 
a public boon and a patriotic effort in the interest of 
the people. The committee favorably reports, the 
stock of the company soon goes down, the investors 
become frightene<l and throw their holdings upon 
the market, and the speculators, who have sold short 
in anticipation of this effect, cover their contracts at 
a large profit. They then buy again at the panic 
price, the measure is quietly killed, the stocks and 
bonds affected resume their normal relation, the 
speculators are again the winners, hundreds, per- 
haps thousands, of people who could ill afford it are 
the losers and legislation and legislators are injured 



95 

in that essential of government, the confidence of the 
people. 

A hundred years ago the controversy began for 
and against corporations as a method for the trans- 
action of any business. Alexander Hamilton be- 
lieved that there were certain functions in the opera- 
tions of commerce which could not be carried on by 
individuals, but must be by semipublic corpora- 
tions. He foresaw that banking and transportation 
must take this form. He passed through the Legis- 
lature the charter of the Bank of New York. Aaron 
Burr, who was the leader of the opposite party, saw 
his opportunity, became the antimonopolist cham- 
pion, assailed this bank charter, then the only cor- 
poration in our State, as endangering the liberties of 
the people and was triumphantly elected to the 
Legislature. He then procured a charter for a com- 
pany to meet the popular demand for pure water in 
New York, and into it he artfully injected a clause 
under which he and his friends organized the Man- 
hattan Bank, which celebrated its one-hundredth 
anniversary last week. Burr has left many de- 
scendants. 

Our platform on these birthdays has always been 
as frank and free as a talk in the family on all ques- 
tions of the hour. The flood of eloquence at the 
Metropolitan Opera Honse and the Grand Central 
Palace suggests some subjects, which are not 
yet party issues, which may be profitably pur- 
sued. After reading all the speeches, some 
good, some indifferent, some bad and some 
incomprehensible, except on the theory best 
expressed by the slang phrase of my Bowery 



96 

friends that the orator was " talking through his 
hat," I had this thought: An attack of the grippe 
this winter ran my pulse down to fifty beats a min- 
ute. I found that at fifty beats a minute the heart 
has not the force to furnish the current which will 
keep going the wheels of the thinking machinery. 
My doctor concocted a pill of strychnine, arsenic and 
other poisons, which, if taken in the right number, 
brought the pulse up to seventy, and the mental fac- 
tory had the motive power for its work. If, however, 
the patient should take an overdose he would 
climb the Golden Stairs. I thought many of those 
speakers and many of the writers on these subjects 
would be benefited by my doctor's pills, and the 
world would be the gainer if some of them took an 
overdose. 

The general propositions were, that it is a crime 
to make money and a greater crime to keep it; that 
we live in an age of the grossest commercialism; 
that our country has a worse attack than any other; 
that the worship of the dollar has destroyed public 
spirit, patriotism, religion, noble aims and high 
ideals. Shade of Jefferson! These apostles claim to 
be your disciples. They teach the seventy-five mil- 
lions of American people who revere your memory 
that such is the result of the principles, worked out 
in practice, in the government wliich you and your 
immortal associates founded. Madam Kolland, as 
she stood at the foot of the scaffold waiting to be 
guillotined by Robespierre and the French revolu- 
tionists, exclaimed: 'n)h, Liberty, Liberty, what 
crimes are committed in thy name! " I Avondcr how 
many believe all this. I wonder how many who 



07 

thus talk and write believe the American people can 
be brought to endorse these views or that they do 
not see the nonsense through the flimsy veil of lurid 
rhetoric. It is an indisputable fact that the whole 
people of the United States were never so powerful, 
or so prosperous, or collectively and individually 
possessed so much in opportunity, in liberty, in edu- 
cation, in employment, in wages, in men Avho from 
nothing have become powers in the community, and 
boys who from poverty have secured education and 
attained competence, as to-day. A young man who 
can pay a dollar for a dinner and do no injustice to 
his family has started successfully in his career. 
Here are five hundred gentlemen within these walls. 
There is scarcely one of them who cannot remember 
the difficulty, the anxieties and the work of securing 
his first surplus dollar. Everyone of you from that 
dollar has, because of American conditions and a 
true conception of American liberty, become a 
leader in the pulpit, at the bar, in medicine, in jour- 
nalism, in art, in the management of industries, in 
the work of firms and corporations and in business 
of every kind. This assemblage — and its like can be 
gathered in every state, county, city and village in 
our country — illustrates that true spirit of commer- 
cialism which inspires ambition and makes a career; 
that true development of American manhood which 
is ever striving for something better in its material 
conditions, which has time for the work of the 
church, for politics, for the public service, for the 
improvement of the home and the pleasures of and 
for the family. Out, out upon this miserable pes- 
simism! The 200,000 young men who last April an- 



98 

swered the call of the President to enlist and fight 
for the freedom of Cuba and the million more who 
wanted to be called are the answers of the youth of 
our land to the cry of decaying public spirit. 

There were the stocks of only two corporations 
dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange in 1800. 
There have been the issues of a hundred and sixty 
new companies put upon the market since the first 
of January, 1899. Almost every form of industry, 
outside of agriculture, has drifted into corporations. 
Most of the money of the country, whether it be the 
accumulations of capitalists, or the fund left for the 
support of the wife and the education of the chil- 
dren, or the earnings deposited in the savings bank 
or put in the life insurance company, is now invested 
in corporate securities. At least seven-tenths of the 
capital and eight-tenths of the labor are under the 
corporate flag. A familiar generalization includes 
semi public companies like railroads, telegraphs, 
telephones, gas and electric lights, manufacturing 
in every form and all kinds of mining. A young man 
and his partners from small beginnings build up a 
great business. If a partner dies the business may 
have to be dissolved. To keep it alive, no matter 
what may happen to one or more members of the 
firm, and to prevent the majority freezing out the 
minority, most of these firms have become corpora- 
tions, and we have a large number of familiar in- 
stances in our city. For the same reason most of the 
newspapers, though the ownership and control may 
be in the hands of one man or of a few men, have 
become corporations. Tlie magnitude of modern 
business and its hot competitions have evolved also 



90 

the trust. I am familiar with one instance illus- 
trating this process. A company — or, rather, a 
trust — was formed, and, as usual, overcapitalized, 
with the intention of absorbing the leading factories 
in a certain product of prime necessity, and then 
driving what are called the little fellows out of busi- 
ness. The little fellows put their factories into one 
corporation, capitalizing each at its actual value; the 
owners became the managers and selected the ablest 
of their members for the general officers. These 
men, understanding their business and conducting it 
themselves in the fight against the over-capitalized 
trust run by high-salaried officials who had no inter- 
est in the business, beat the trust, compelled its sur- 
render and triumphantly vindicated their business 
sagacity and skill. 

This tendency of the times cannot be met by shout- 
ing. As the business in this form is of necessity pub- 
lic because done under a public charter the state 
must exercise a scrutiny which would not be per- 
mitted in the conduct of private affairs. The state 
is bound to protect its people against any enterprise 
which, under the form of law and its protection, is 
injurious to the people. It is bound to protect the 
investor by keeping the electric light of publicity 
constantly upon all its creations. The vast wealth 
which has poured into our country because the world 
has become our debtor apparently exhausted the se- 
curities in which money could be profitably invested. 
Three per cent interest, after the taxes are taken out, 
leaves little income for the support of the helpless, 
which every prudent and right-minded man desires 
to provide. This situation was speedily grasped by 



kLefC. 



/" 



100 

far-sighted and speculative men who have organized 
the present industrial craze. " Come with us," they 
cry, " and we can give you five per cent upon our 
bonds, six per cent upon our preferred stock and an 
income upon the common only to be gauged by the 
growth of the countiy." Three thousand millions of 
dollars at i)ar of these securities have been floated 
since the first of January. Some of them doubtless 
are good, some of them bad and some good as to part 
of their securities and worthless as to otliers. The 
crying need of the hour is for some method by which 
light shall be let into every one of these corporations 
or chartered concerns and the public advised of their 
condition, their operations, their management and 
their right to live. 

Forty years ago a verj- rich man was looked upon 
as a demigod. There were very few, they were fol- 
lowed everywhere with admiration, their movements 
were heralded and they were greeted by admiring 
crowds. Notwithstanding this cry about money, the 
time has passed when a man receives public consid- 
eration or applause simply because he has money, no 
matter how much. There are hundreds now who 
have more than the richest possessed forty years ago. 
They are judged wholly by the use which they make 
of their wealth. They are expected to so manage it 
as to promote and enlarge the enterprises which de- 
velop the countr}', distribute and disseminate mone}' 
and give employment. They are held to be trustees, 
and are measured according to their administration 
of the trust. The church and charity, education and 
ail have claims upon them which they must meet. 



101 

Hoarded money has not a tithe of the power nor a 
particle of the respect wliich it had forty years ago. 
As we advance in life we appreciate more day 
by day the value of time. With every revolu- 
tion of the earth there is less left. AYe must econo- 
mize it. We who are active in affairs and must meet 
many people find out who are the enemies and who , 
the friends of our time. The scatter-brain dissipates [ 
and the sure-footed man conserves it. The late Leo- 
pold Morse, while a member of Congress, was enter- 
tained at a big house on Fifth Avenue. A guest 
said: " Delighted to see you, Morse. Where are you 
stopping?" Morse replied: "At the St. Cloud Hotel.'' 
His friend said: "For Heaven's sake, Morse, don't do 
that again; that's the San Clou." The next day 
Morse went into his banker's, who said: " Glad to 
see you, Morse; where are you stopping?" Morse 
said, "At the San Clou." The banker said: " Come 
off your perch. That may do in Boston, but here it's 
plain English, St. Cloud." Morse, much distressed, 
was stopped on Wall street soon after by an ac- 
quaintance, who said: " Morse, I want to come up 
and see you this evening; where are you stopping? " 
Morse answered : " Hanged if I know." Morse should 
have been sure of himself and stuck to it. The man 
who ought to be killed after the first half hour is the 
one w^ho, having made an engagement, uses thirty 
minutes in developing a matter in which he knows 
you are interested and then proceeds, having gained, 
as he thinks, your confidence, to exploit the scheme 
for which he came. I always turn that man down. 
A gentleman, who had been a member of Congress, 
came into my office one day. He first enlarged upon 



102 

the railway system of the couutry; then he spoke of 
the Vanderbilt lines in the west and the perils they 
might encounter from competition. Thon he sent a 
roller flying across the floor which developed about 
five yards of map. He pointed out how a line be- 
tween certain points would render the Vanderbilt 
system impregnable and, if iu the hands of hostile 
parties, would destroy it. He wished me to raise for 
him, or, rather, his railroad, thirty millions of dol- 
lars. I said to him: " Do you remember the famous 
phrase of Pitt after the battle of Austerlitz? " He 
said indignantly: " I did not come here, Mr, Depew, 
to listen to any of your jokes, but to save your cli- 
ent's fortune for the niggardly sum of thirty millions 
of dollars." I said: " Well, do you remember what 
Pitt said after the battle of Austerlitz? " " Ko," he 
said impatiently; 'Mvhat did he say?" "Well," 1 
replied, " the great English statesman made this re- 
mark: ' Roll up the map of Europe.' " Said he, " Do 

you mean ? " I said " I do." He rolled up the 

map and then stated his business. Said he: '' Will 
you give me a pass home? " 

The sure-footed man is a benefactor. In the pulpit 
he uives vou something to take home to think about 
and talk over at the Sunday dinner, at the bar he 
makes the jury in a short time think his way and the 
judge is influenced by his directness aud lucidity. 
He states his business proposition to you so quickly 
and so clearly that you know instantly whether yon 
can afford to embark in it or not. He dismisses his 
board of directors with a ten minute statement 
wliicli reveals to them the exact condition aud true 
prospects of the company. He tells a story so that 



103 

the point punctures and delights you without giving 
you the horrors of knowing it long before he is 
through. You sit beside him if you can at dinner, 
you select him for your companion in travel, you 
take him into your business if he is free and you 
make him your executor in your will. 

My friends, we pass this way but once. We cannot 
retrace our steps to any preceding milestone. Every 
time the clock strikes, it is both the announcement of 
the hour upon which we are entering and the knell 
of the one which is gone. Each night memors^ bal- 
ances the books and we know before we sleep 
whether the result is on the right or on the wrong 
side of our account. In some measure we can meet 
the injunction of the poet who said, 

" Think that day lost whose low descending sun, 
Views from thy hand no noble action done." 

There is no cant in this sentiment. The noble ac- 
tion does not mean necessarily anything in the 
realms of romance or heroism. It may be the merest 
commonplace in business or association, a word of 
sympathy, kindness or encouragement, a little help 
sorely needed and not felt by the giver, but if it has 
shed one beam of brightness into the life of another 
the dividend is earned. The older we grow the more 
we realize that life is worth the living. We think too 
little of the fun there is in it. We are too parsimo- 
nious of laughter. We do not appreciate as we ought 
the man or the woman who can make us forget while 
we are amused. We cannot help the past and that 
man is a fool who lives in it. To-day is a better day 



104 

than yesterday but to-morrow is the land of promise. 
Let us walk through our pathways, be they rugged 
or smooth, believing in Browning's beautiful lines: 

The earth is crammed with Heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God, 
But only he who sees takes off his shoes. 



LBJL'05 



'■■^••>i:y-6',:;^-<«',. 



CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW 



Birthday Addresses 



AT IMP, 



MoNTAUK Club of Brooklyn 



The Monlaii clal organixatloa In New York which ha» 

utuined great prvum. ,,,,.1/,, m,^ n,-».M^,,..>. .^.- „,,,• .-•:c-ir<r'ni.h/Ti 

fellow-citirerri Mr. Cha 



Q 



